You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Sauron, Bacon, Fug, Batman...

Sauron in spaaaaaaace!

***

Someone once bought me a Goblin Teasmaid, which was an alarm clock/electric jug combo, so you can have a cup of tea when you wake up. That was fairly cool, but how cool would it be to be able to Wake'n'Bacon? (There are some other interesting bits there, including a lamp that pulses to your heartbeat.)

Speaking of random links, I'm not sure I understand the point of magazines like Woman's Weekly when you have websites like Go Fug Yourself. I remember Morgue saying that sites like Fametracker were part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, and I suspect that GFY falls under the same rubric.

***

Some friends came over and we watched the original Batman movie - I had forgotten how violent it was, and how many people Batman killed. (I'd also forgotten how bad the costume was. ;) I enjoyed the film, especially the buildings of Gotham, though I found it weird how weak Kim Bassinger's character was portrayed to be - she is meant to have been a war photographer, but all we see onscreen is her being squeamish and ineffectual, and her only active and vaguely effective action against the Jocker is to use her feminine wiles. I guess it's no more realistic to have all heroines sassy and ready to knee their captors in the groin than to have all heroes be chisel-jawed martial artists... but nevertheless, I was kinda surprised. As amphigorey pointed out, at least she removed her high-heels before trying to run around. ;)

Incidentally, hot buttered rum is an excellent way to use Danish blackcurrant rum. Very yum indeed. :)

***

I drove into town yesterday in the hopes of joining the Film Society, since they didn't appear to have anyone manning the booths at MFC ticketing or the theatres when I went looking on Saturday. I was too late - everyone had gone into the movie. But a helpful theater staffperson directed me at a guy standing in the hall to the theatre, who pointed out that the booking form actually has the option to join the Film Society. (If the MFC booking guy had pointed this out to me on Saturday, it would have saved me a lot of trouble - he seemed to be pretty surly, though. I guess it's not a job that's much fun.)

This, combined with the fact that I'd actually managed to find a park outside Arty Bees, meant that I decided to buy a book of Native American folktales and the Latin textbook that I had in third-form (which was published in 1938, if I remember rightly). It's surprising how many memories the textbook evoked... it reminded me of flipping through an old copy of the Monster Manual last year. Okay, I may have gone a geek to far there. ;) I was actually looking for books in a number of series that I collect, but I've been unsuccessful so far - I suspect that it's something to do with the fact that if they're good enough for me to collect, they're good enough for people to not sell. :)

Okay, I started writing this four days ago - time to publish, methinks.

Random pic, Hudsucker, Batman, Laptop

I don't have anything much to say about the image to the right, apart from noting that it's kinda cool. :) I've no information about it's provenance or history - I just stumbled across the image while looking for something else. Click on it for a full-sized version.

However - it does remind me of the fake dragon embryo that they have at the Oxford University Museum. I should try and find a copy of the book that was written about it - they had sold out of it while i was there.

***

Rewatched The Hudsucker Proxy with C a little while ago - C made the very astute observation that the Polly Perkins character from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow would have been much cooler if she'd been closer to the reporter character in Hudsucker - having just watched Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, it made a lot of sense... huh, according to IMDB, Hudsucker references HGF. [follows link] Whoa, weird, Jennifer Jason Leigh was given the female character of that film as a reference. That's kind of spooky...

Oh, while I'm talking about films - I enjoyed Batman Begins a lot, though it's got nothing in common with the other Batman movies. Which is probably just as well, since the first one, while fun, was more a Burton film with characters that share names with ones in Batman than a canonical representation... but then again, is "canon" the comics, the animated series, or the 70s cult TV show? Uh, anyway, cool film - not perfect, but cool. :)

***

Hire-a-Hubby have a sister company, Mobile Mums. I think there's something interesting going on here - specificially, the fact that it's not "Dial-A-Dad" or... something catchy with "Wife" in the name that I'm not currently feeling creative enough to come up with at the moment.

Yeah, I'm not going to expand on that though, sorry. Look at the freaky cat-bird thing above, instead. :)

***

I bought a laptop. I didn't mean to, and now is pretty much the worst time for me to have done so (with a tax bill and the Film Festival coming up), but it was only $1300 for a really nice machine. (I realized how nice when someone inside the company called me up two hours after I bought it, offering to buy it off me for $1500.) It's a two year-old Dell, and Mum has already claimed use of it when she needs it... so now I guess I should learn a bit about Windows administration, file sharing, and so on.

But it's a really cool laptop! And it'll give me a lot more options for running games, hurrah! And it reads the DVDs that Lee burns me, and I suspect it's a much more modern box than my current desktop. And it has built-in wireless, though the reception in the living-room is not great. But - laptop! Hurrah!

***

As readers may have guessed (or noticed, or in one instance been told by their mothers), C and I are going out again, and have been for a little while - though we weren't back when she "forced" me to buy the Penguin NZ History book, or even when her character tried to distract the Grand Vizier by swinging a cat by its tail. ;) Anyway, while I am experiencing a little thrill of superstitious dread, I figure that I'll end up mentioning it by accident at some point anyway, so I may as well do it now. :)

***

This article rings very true for me, as an I.T. person working for a special effects company. Hey, there's a great idea - a special affects company, that creates novel emotions for use in the entertainment industry! ;)

Okay, I'm going to post this now, otherwise I'll never do so. :)

Games, Sky Captain vs Kong

The players seemed to enjoy the big explode-irific finale to the Changeling game - there were duels, reverses, gunshots, wild rides clinging to the bonnet of souped-up SUVs along Jervois Quay, and a mecha-Queens Event Center rampaging along the waterfront. (The character made a little bit of a mess of Wellington.) Plus, we set up the next season - though I'm not sure whether it will eventuate.

I was talking to Sok about running a game for her - I think I'd want to run something with a lot fewer players, maybe three or four. Sok, this is just me thinking out loud, but what sounds more like the kind of game you might enjoy:

(a) A thirties pulp game - the players are freelance investigative reporters who travel to exotic locations, outwit the local authorities, and scoop rivals (including each other). If there are four players, then you've got two teams of two (reporter and sidekick - photographer, driver, cub reporter learning from a big gun, whatever) who keep on bumping into each other on big stories all over the globe. The feel I'm thinking of is movies like the Indiana Jones series, His Girl Friday, Young Sherlock Holmes, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and the Mummy movies. For those that care, I'd probably use the system called The Shadows of Yesterday - it's nice and fast, and deals well with PC vs PC conflict.

(b) A Nobilis game - players are people who've become the personification of an aspect of reality, like Cold, or Betrayal, or Feathers. You have to deal with your Familia, who are other Nobles who belong to the same Imperator (the thing that imbued you with your powers); and defend yourself from other Nobles, opposing factions, and creatures from outside the universe who are trying to escape by destroying it - one aspect at a time. This is a very cool setting, and the kinds of things that the PCs can get up to can be pretty mind-bending, and you end up doing things like working out the difference between Greed and Avarice. (According to Medraut, Noble of Avarice and of the familia of Ramiah the Fallen Angel - "Avarice gloats." Turns out he looks just like the actor who plays Mr Morden on B5, by the way. :)

(c) A straightforward swashbuckling fantasy game. Players would be the crew of a merchant ship, sailing between ports and living by their wits and the skin of their teeth. I'd be looking towards Treasure Planet, Firefly, the various Sinbad movies and the like. I'd probably get people to look after multiple people in the crew, rather than having a ship that only needs a crew of three.

Anyway, if any of these set-ups sound like your cup of tea, Sok, drop me a line. I'm happy to meet and chat with you about it, possibly with the others who'd be playing.

***

Speaking of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, I watched it with C. last night. Now, I don't mind that it didn't make much sense - the plot felt like it was following the pulp feel, and the threatened disaster was not dafter than half a dozen others I've seen. What was annoying was that it kept on stopping and starting, and the flow of the story felt really clunky. It's yet another movie that is frustrating because it looks like it could have been awesome, but... isn't. It is pretty, however - costumes, hair and sets are quite cool. I certainly intend to watch all the special features at some point, but I suspect I'll be looking to see if I can work out what went wrong.

I suppose that this raises a legitimate worry - what if Kong is another Sky Captain, Van Helsing or League of Extraordinary Gentleman? It must be so disheartening to pour a year of your life into a project, only to have people go "meh". We've been pretty lucky so far - I mean, I, Robot wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible. And from what I've seen, I've been drawn in by the performances a lot more - both of the actors and the creatures. And it seems like the kind of story that's likely to play to PJ's strengths. Admittedly, it'd be very hard to tell whether or not it'll actually be good until we see an actual cut - but as far as I can tell, it looks like it shouldn't suck. For which I am profoundly grateful. :)

***

And that's about it. Panic in the halls as a filer went down, causing Dailies to grind to a halt; we're thanking our lucky stars that it didn't happen last week, and I'm thanking any guardian powers watching over me at this time that the effects on things I'm responsible for were minimal. I've got an interesting task to sink my teeth into, which I really need to make space in my schedule to do; and I've done a bunch of small jobs that people tell me have helped them enormously. :)

Looking forward to seeing the Kong trailer - and I have Agents collecting me a ticket for Batman Begins tomorrow. Hoorah! :)

Weekend, Chat, Cat

Had a very relaxing weekend indeed. Friday evening was drinks with a very good group of people at Red Square to say goodbye to the lovely Emba - with the breakup of the Girl Flat, I no longer get to see SuperSok nearly as often, so it was good to seize the opportunity to have a chat. And I got to have a good natter with the ever-charming HP (and Zephfi, Sas et al.), and a ride home from the guest of honour, so I'm really glad I made the effort to get out there.

Saturday I had lunch with C., and after a wander around the ship that's to be sunk in Lyall Bay, went and saw Mr & Mrs Smith - which isn't anything like the Alfred Hitchcock movie by the same name, if IMDB summaries are any guide. It was full of the pretty and the explode-y, which was exactly what I was expecting and hoping for. However, it reminds me of a anecdote about a ballerina, possibly Russian, who was asked what her dance meant, and replied something like, "If I could tell you in words, what would be the point of dancing it?" Yeah, the movie was nothing like that. ;) You could almost see the steps by which the one-line summary that became a blockbuster that was precisely an optimal two hours long, a polished and professional gavotte of movie-production that turned out a fun and diverting film that was exactly what you were expecting.

Oh, and despite the Weight of the Unread, I bought a copy of the Penguin History of NZ. I mean, I was waiting at Whitcoulls, it was there, all on sale and half-pricey, and... well... I think it's only fair to point out that it was entirely C's fault, as if I weren't having lunch with her, then I wouldn't have been waiting there. And since she has no forum in which to refute this charge, I am obviously both correct and completely blameless. >;)

After the movie, I zoomed homeward with the car, zoomed back out on public transport, and bumped into Amphigori and Hugh as I bumbled my way to Sok's birthday party. (Mental note - do not write "just off Cuba St" when you can write "Next to the Met Shop, just off Cuba St".) I arrived slightly later in the proceedings than I originally planned, but in plenty of time to socialize and wish Sok a happy birthday. Oh, and try some of her cheese and crackers. And quite a nice tart & sorbet. And several drinks. :)

And then, on Sunday... I really, truly did mean to take my rained-on washing in, give it a quick rinse in the washing machine, and either hang it out inside or pop over to the parents and use their dryer. But... well... I ended up reading a bit. Well... a lot. About three and a half novels, in fact. And... well, you don't really need to get out of bed to do that. So I didn't. (Except to have a bath, and make myself a salad from a bunch of greens that needed using up.) So... the Unread is a little smaller, which is good. (Not as smaller as it could be, since one of those novels was a re-read.) But... yeah, not my most productive day ever. :)

***

They've just installed a chat client, and set up a chatroom for the tech guys. I suspect it'll actually be quite useful for the supportinators, since they're scattered to so many different locations; it's less vital for the Systems team, since we're all in the same room. It turns out that I'm just as wordy in chat as in email or blogging - who'da thunk? :) Anyway, being able to chat is still at the novelty stage, so I expect a fair bit of wasted time; luckily, with the trailer delivered, it should be a bit quieter for Support and the Wranglers. For a while, at least.

(Unfortunately, I've been getting a whole bunch of requests that they've obviously been saving up while the trailer has been in full effect. So I was here until 8pm yesterday, and would be doing the same tonight if it weren't for the fact that I'm running the last session of the Changeling game.)

***

StuffOnMyCat.com. I'm not sure what to say.

Books, Internets, School

I've been tempted to take part in a meme that appeared in Jenni's blog - unsurprisingly, it's book related. Don't worry, I doubt it's the start of a trend. ;) I think my main reason for filling out the answers was that I knew the answers to some of them, and knew that I didn't know the answers to others. Anyhoo, on the questions!

How many books do you own?
According to my records, I have 1124 fiction books, 406 non-fiction books, and 96 Graphic novels, for a grand total of 1626 books. I suspect that a few books have slipped in "under the radar", as it were, but this is a reasonably complete survey of the books I own.

There are two large bookshelves and one half-size bookshelf in the hall, which is where most of my non-fiction and detective fiction lives; there are a similar number of bookshelves in my room, though I really need another big shelf or two so I can stop double-stacking. There are also about four or five A4 boxes of unread books under my window, and two large plastic trundle-boxes and three or four A4 boxes of unread books under my bed. I have no idea where these will go once I read them, but at my current rate of consumption, I suspect that it's not a problem I'll need to worry about for a little while.

What is the last book you bought?
Well, I bought SK a book of urban myths that looked pretty interesting for his birthday last week... but I suspect that you're meant to talk about books you've bought for yourself. Hmm.

It's actually been quite a while since I've bought any books - the weight of the Unread sits on my conscience. I think the last one was a book of folk stories told by people who'd moved to Australia from different parts of Indo-China, which was written in both English and the person's native language (Thai, Korean, etc.) - it had some details about the narrator's life in the old country, and how it was they had come to know the story. It was pretty nifty. Ah, here are the details - Stories and Storytellers From Indo-China, edited by Morag Loh.

What is the last book you read?
I've just finished reading What If? The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, edited by Robert Cowley & Stephen E. Ambrose. Interesting, but in many cases I felt like the historians simply pointed at the turning point, rather than exploring the consequences; on the other hand, even my limited knowledge of history let me recognise that some of the consequences suggested had more to do with the historian's personal biases than a sober assessment of the situation. I suspect that this is why I like the whole newsgroup set-up - it lets me get a feel for alternate viewpoints and the kind of debate reasonable people might have. (Okay, maybe that's not true for all newsgroups, or even all members of good newsgroups. But you can't have everything. ;)

Name five books that mean a lot to you.
Blood and Honour, by Simon Green. I read it before Blue Moon Rising, so while I like that book, it's this one that's stayed with me. There's a interaction in the second or third season of The West Wing, where the protagonists are arguing about which Gilbert & Sullivan opera a particular song comes from - one says, "It's the one about duty!" and the other replies, "They're all about duty!" I think that's why I like the G&S operettas, and why I like this book.

Guns, Germs & Steel, by Jared Diamond. It's not necessarily the easiest read, but it gave me a lot to think about, and the basic conceit (that geography plays a vital role in the large scale of history) is convincingly argued. It's one of those books that is just begs to be mentioned to friends or brought up when you want a meaty discussion; however, unlike Blood & Honour, it's not a book that I've reread a bunch of times. Still, it's one of those cannonical books that you hear about a lot if you read in certain subjects, and then you read it yourself, and then it's, "Yeah, I see why people point at it as one of the Books You Should Read."

Three others... hmm. I think the Solar Queen series merits a mention, possibly because these are the first books that I remember thinking, "Wait a mintute, that doesn't make any sense" - and then decided to go on and enjoy the book regardless. (There was some plot point where they hid from the authorities of Earth by landing in the middle of a radioactive wasteland, which happened to have recovered. But if the Earth authorities had spaceships, wouldn't they be able to overfly the area, and even if they didn't apot our heroes, wouldn't they have noticed the weird alien life in the middle of this supposed dead spot, and have investigated?) It was also around the time when I filled out piles and piles of interloan request forms - I remember I was 11, because you had to fill out your age, and for a while after then, I'd write "11" in that space on those pink cards by default, because I'd filled out so many of them in one almighty go. :)

Two more. I remember a sf collection that my parents had which contained two of the most terrifying stories I'd ever read - "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell and Tom Godwin's 1954 classic "The Cold Equations". "Who Goes There?" became the movie, The Thing, and essentially asked - if a creature could absorb and steal the shape of any living thing, how would you detect it? How would you stop it? It's a tense action story, with heroes and monsters - I've seen it compared to Beowulf in theme. "The Cold Equations", on the other hand, is all about the fact that sometimes the universe doesn't care what kind of person you are. A girl stows away in a spaceship, and the pilot must eject her into space, because he doesn't have enough fuel to take her with him, and she can't pilot the ship alone. I couldn't sleep for hours after reading this story - the image of the compasionate pilot having to kill the essentially innocent stowaway was something that I found quite freaky.

Last one... The Double Helix, by James Watson. I appreciate that it may be a biased account of the discovery of DNA, and may paint an unfair picture of Rosalind Franklin - but it's a compelling account, and probably one of the reasons that I became interested in biology in the first place.

Huh. That was harder than I thought it would be. :)

***

In my office, we were discussing what a bad idea a cross between Snoop Dog-style slang and Leet would be. "D15 be teh sh1zzlexor!!1one!1!" "W00t1zzl3!!"

This conversation sprang out of an anecdote about someone calling something "teh suxxor", and having the people around him going, "huh?" He said it wasn't so much that he was surprised that they hadn't heard it before, but that they weren't able to work out what he meant by context - though to be fair, they might have thought that he had simply used a foreign phrase that they were unfamiliar with. But I've had the same experience - I would have thought that calling someone "teh awesome" would be pretty clear, but apparently not. Maybe they were simply weirded out that I was using slang. Wait a sec - "weirded out"? Would I have used that phrase if it weren't for Strongbad? Damn you, internets!

On a related note, I know I'm not on the cutting edge of internet humour and craziness - it was several months after the fact (after the fad?) that I saw the llama song, for instance, and the same with the whole "All Your Base" thing or even Bananaphone. But there are things that I think of as being around forever, like the whole Mahir/"I Kiss You!!!!" craze, or even The Big Red Button That Doesn't Do Anything, which I just kinda assume are part of the whole "using the net" experience - and maybe it is, if you've been using it since early enough. Maybe the web's too big now for the hamsterdance... which might not be a bad thing. :) However, I do remember sending my mother the original hamsterdance, and hearing that my youngest sister had been reduced to tears of laughter.

It feels like I should have a summary point that I've been working toward; unfortunately, I don't know that I do, other than, "Sometimes I fail the Smarties test." (For those who aren't interested in developmental psychology, you show the child a packet of Smarties, and ask them what they think is in the box. You then show them that it's full of pencils (or whatever). You then tell them that you're going to ask their mum, who is out of the room, what is in the box - and what do they think their mum will say? It's a test about when you get an internal model of other people's mental states.)

***

I thought Jenni might be interested in Barbies customized to look like the members of Kiss, amoung other things.

***

Meant to mention my primary school's 150th year reunion. Unsurprisingly, very few people from my cohort turned up - I mean, I was really only there because I was the only child from my family in the city apart from my youngest sister, so I had to go to support my father (who in turn had to go, because he had been on the Board of Trustees for so long). In fact, I was the only one from my year - there were a handful of girls from the year ahead of me, and a few people from the year behind me. But all in all, it wasn't too bad - I chatted to some former teachers, some of whom appeared to have been unchanged by the passage of years (and one or two who were fairly shockingly different). I can certainly see why the "school reunion" is such a big thing in the States, and is such a useful setting for fiction; but I'm not really surprised that there were so few people in the post-1970 group photo.

Incidentally, my old school was St Francis de Sales, formerly St Madeline Sophies, and the motto of the school is, "The Measure of Love is Love Without Measure". Not a slogan to push you to academic heights, true, but not a bad thing to strive for, really.

Music, Strom Thurmond, Nobilis

One of the great things about the mighty interweb is that there are very few ideas so odd that no-one will put up a website dedicated to them. I thinkCrying While Eating is probably a case in point. Just... huh.

***

This revelation just in from the musos in the room - midi files are almost all white. There is apparently some sort of unfunkifier built into the file-format, which removes all trace of soul or natural rhythm.

This discussion was prompted by this story about PJ buying a robot band. (It's fairly obvious from the video that he saw it quite some time ago, since it's him pre-slim&trim phase.) Anyway, the rendition of "A Day in the Life" might have been more impressive in person, but via video it appears to be even more lifeless than the typical waiting-in-the-lift composition.

And while we're talking about music - after going through a brief girl-punk phase (Elastica, The Coolies, Foamy Ed... I'm pretty sure Le Tigre doesn't count, though they were in there), I'm listening to Minuit - the Guns EP at the moment, but I've also got the Luck EP and Eighty-Eight. Crank it up just a little on my headphones, and I can drown out the room quite effectively - the only downside is my tendency to bop along to the music a bit.

Huh - I had a quick look at Real Groovy and SmokeCDs to point at some samples of the two NZ bands I mentioned, and it looks like you can't get the Foamy Ed or The Coolies EPs anymore... it seems weird that recorded music can just, like, become unavailable. I mean, I'm still annoyed that I haven't managed to locate Cloudboy's first EP, or anything by Mink other than For My Mink, and I remember finding an album by Rude Bones (a Japanese ska band) in Germany that I didn't buy, and have regretted not buying ever since... and there was the second Republica album that I bought while waiting in a train station in Norway, which I hadn't heard of before or seen since. Admittedly, I'm also super-reluctant to pay "import" prices for music - $25/album that I'm fairly sure I'll like I can make my peace with, but $40 just seems too much.

Okay, so it's not like the situation sixty years ago, when you couldn't get the original recordings, and had to make do with a local artist's interpretation of, say, "Rock Around the Clock" rather than Bill Hayley's version, unless you had a specialty order from overseas. But now that you can have books printed on demand for pretty much the same price as a mass-produced one, it seems like there's no good reason for anyone not to get a physical CD of anything they want.

(I'm not that keen on mp3-only purchases - I like having physical evidence of my support for artists, and having the whole liner-notes thing tied to the music. And I've not been particularly keen on any of the DRM schemes I've seen.)

Yep, I definitely have something that I'm meant to be doing that I'm avoiding - I can tell by how much I'm writing. ;)

***

I can see how you might not find Strom Thurmond and his Feathered Friends funny, but it appeals to me, and that's what's important.

***

One of the frustrating things about Nobilis is that there are awesome fragments of writing scattered throughout, pretending to be extracts of larger works - but there is no larger work to read! And I really want to read them! For example:

"Okay, here's what I'm thinking," he said. "None of us individually is strong enough to take that monster. What we're going to need to do is pool our powers -- coordinate our abilities to take the thing down together. If we all work together, after all, there's nothing that can stop us."

"First," I said, "it's fairly obvious that all of us working together means bugger all when it comes to fighting dragons. Second, and I realize this is a subtle point, everyone else is dead. Third, and most cogently of all, I hate your guts."

"But otherwise?"

"An admirable plan."
-- from "The Dog Princes" by Janet Cable

But there is no book called "The Dog Princes"! Wah!!

Drowned Baby, Interweb, Work

What do I do when I finish the epic "For All Nails" timeline? Why, start reading the excellent Drowned Baby Timeline, that's what! It's an exploration of what might happen if Hitler drowned as a baby, and what with Poles (counter)invading Germany, Il Duce getting the Bomb, and Göring in Rick's role in a Casablanca-esque scenario - how could I resist? And I've only read up to part 15!

Of course, I have learned something from my previous experiences, and last time I was reading it I only stayed up to quarter-past eleven, rather than quarter-to four. ;) It probably doesn't help that I'm reading all of the comments that were made at the time, as well. Anyway, hooray for soc.history.what-if, and the people who have time to write cool stuff.

***

Speaking of newsgroups and history, people may be interested in the Zumabot's Tale, which talks about someone who spammed the soc.* groups in the mid-nineties whenever the words "Armenia" or "Turkey" turned up with pro-Turkish propoganda, but didn't distinguish between the country and the bird. I would have said that those days are over, and the internet community is too diverse to be affected by something like that again - but I remember when Network Solutions (who look after the .com domains) changed things so if you asked for a domain that didn't exist, they gave you back a page that offered to sell it to you. A similarly wide variety of people were annoyed and inconvenienced, so I guess the web is still small enough.

By the by, I've occasionally caught myself using/thinking of "interweb" as if it were a real word. Very worrying.

Oh, and if this is going to be a webbish comment, I figure I'd point people at Google Gulp, on the off-chance people hadn't seen it.

***

Work has been slightly crazy - I think that the main reason is that a number of people are feeling rushed, so they're more careless about what they type & do, which means that a number of systems that are moderately fragile break or produce odd results.Lots of chasing around after misdiagnosed problems, or fixing weird situations. Among the things that aren't helping is that I'm feeling vaguely feverish - not enough that I can justify losing a day's pay, but enough to be unpleasant. Still, all in all I'd rather be too busy than having heaps of time on my hands at the moment.

Not that I'm sorry that there's only two days until the trailer is due. :)

Apparently we'll get to see the trailer at an upcoming oh-so-inappropriately named Monthlies, which will be the first we've had this year. I'll be interested to see how things look - of course, I won't be able to say anything, any more than I can talk about what I've already seen.

With an audible thump...

...I'm back to being single. (The transition was actually fairly iconic - I had chocolate and roses with me at the time, though I really needed to be standing in the rain to complete the cliche.)

As may be deduced from the fact that I've turned comments off for this section, I'm not particularly enthusiastic about talking about it. As may be deduced from the parenthesised section above, I'm attempting to deal with the situation with a modicum of humour and distancing - which is a strategy that is not particularly compatible with expressions of sympathy, and I ask that you consider that if you were thinking about emaling me. I feel I should apologise about that, but I prefer to deal with this kind of thing on my own. (Of course, blogging about it isn't exactly dealing with it privately - but it seemed the most efficient and least... awkward way to inform people.)

Happily, I'm working tomorrow, which should provide a welcome distraction.

This will be the last time this stuff will be mentioned here - or anywhere, most likely. Normal blog coverage will resume shortly.

TV, RPG, C.

From bash.org:

#222680
<Cheshire> I can't afford those plastic things to cover the electric sockets so I just draw bunny faces on the electric outlets to scare the kids away from them...
<RLtim> Newsflash! Kids aren't afraid of bunnies.
<Cheshire> Oh they will be...

***

To answer someone's question - the person I'm going out with is called Celeste. This either means nothing to you, or is likely to be something you knew already. :) I guess we'll have been going out for two weeks come Sunday... let's see, first year anniversary is paper, second is cotton... what's an appropriate two week anniversary material? Bacon? (Admittedly those materials are wedding anniversary guidelines... heh, "Happy Bacon Wedding Anniversary, dear!") I'm tempted to make up a larger list of faux sub-year anniversaries - "Chocolate", "Beverage", "Alpine-Themed"...

Those wishing to point out that you can't have a two week anniversary, owing the year-ish component of the word, can consider their point amply made; and those with a "commercialism" card that they want to play have been duly heard, as well. ;)

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There's a Miss Marple series that's in the process of being made, with Joanna Lumley as Dolly. Weird. I think I can kind of picture it in my head, but... hmm. I'll probably try to hunt it down at some point. But looking that up led me to The Corpse Bride, which is no doubt old, old news to the Tim Burton aficionados, but had completely passed under my radar.

What I was actually trying to find out was when the Jeeves & Wooster Complete Set was being reissued - the UK release is 18th June, so I might ring Whitcoulls and see when they think they might be getting it in. In the meantime, since Mum wanted me to order something for her, I picked up one or two things from Amazon.ca, including the third season of Due South. Hmm. I guess I'll have to avoid complaining about having no money for a while. ;)

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Ran a fairly successful game on Tuesday, where "successful" is defined as "people had fun". :) I've always liked in media res, but I discovered a way to use it that I hadn't thought of before. (Basically, I'll often cut away from one group while they decided what to do next. In this instance, I'd cut away while the first group decided how to get into town; after the second group did a bunch of stuff, they rang the first group... and I decided that we'd find the first group in the middle of a fight. Total surprise, instant engagement, and a chance for the first group to show their mettle. It worked pretty well, though it would probably get old pretty fast.)

I think there's probably only one more session to go. Which is a pity in some ways, since I like the setting; but it's a lot easier to be a player than a GM. Besides, I should be devoting my prep time to helping Matt & Debbie's planning for the Victorian LARP, among other things. :)

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A camera that can see behind objects? Yes, I think we've got one of those somewhere... :) Man, if we have these, the CSI "refine that grainy image to show information that couldn't possibly have been recorded" video editing software is just around the corner...