if you want to say hello (or something less pleasant) get thee to the messageboard.

i've had a lot more headaches lately. nothing out of standard pattern for me, tension that rolls from my right shoulder, up my neck, and feels like a c-clamp with contacts behind my eye and at the back of my skull. i know the warning signs and how to effectively treat them. but they had been a monthly or less occurrence, and now they are weekly or more.

this doesn't really fit with the general sense of peace in my household, the books i've been devouring*, a new quilt underway, a good last session of D&D before the holidays, and lovely visits with friends (just passed and planned in the near future).

this does fit with 2009, though. i'm coiled and waiting for the next blow.** i was going to post this quote from warren_ellis earlier today, but i thought that i was just asking for trouble. with more lousy news coming from all quarters it seems more appropriate than ever:

"I’m starting to get the sense that 2009 wants to finish me off before it dies of old age. A calendrical unit yelling "I’m taking you with me, you bastard!" from its vanishing final paper bunker marked December, every spent day a room deleted from the structure until 2009 is finally huddled in one small box marked 31 and screaming obscenities in stark terror."



*i'm on a big Bujold kick. somehow i avoided reading any of her books previously, and now i have a steady flow coming in on library holds. they seem to be the grilled cheese and tomato soup of speculative fiction - i don't know that they're terribly good, but they are fatty and salty and filling and exude comfort. the only minus is that Baen has the worst art direction possible. i find myself wanting to hide the covers when i read on the bus because they are so embarrassingly ugly. i have an idea for an epic linkpost of bitching about this, but may never get around to it.

**and i'm pretty sure i'm grinding my teeth in my sleep. i should see a dentist about that. did i mention that my dentist seems to have retired with zero fanfare? i have several hearty recommendations to sort through. staying at the practice he joined before disappearing is not acceptable.

today, UPS left the standard passive-aggressive sticky note and no package.

but hey, if you contact them by seven, you can drive yourself to their warehouse in SODO between the railroad tracks, and then stand around and wait through most of the one-hour window they give you until the package is produced.

and lo, M$ gave us a new 360 with a warranty instead of repairing our busted old one, and a month of Live for our troubles.

they did not, however, send along a power block or a/v cord.




*headdesk*




if you call the service number on the website, you go through a series of recordings that never lead you to a human. if you exhaust the automated menu, it actually says "then i can't help you".

i used their email form. they make you choose a problem from a drop-down menu. "Console will not power on" it is.

i think it was mrdorbin i told that i hadn't had much trouble with Vista and it seemed like the complaints were overwrought.

i was dead wrong.

( blah blah blah ginger )

between that and the hours of Windows update running since, i've spent the entire day dicking with this thing. i knew that i was going to break stuff, but that was the sorriest reinstall i've ever experienced.

one more firewall tweak, and then i'm logging out. and i'm not touching Vista again unless i need it for work.

i am inevitably disappointed when i read a work that has been classed as literary fiction, yet has science fiction themes. still i continue reading them, hoping for another Iron Bridge.*

so, um, Children of Men (the book). all men in the world are suddenly infertile, and we are carefully told that the world supply of stored sperm has also gone bad somehow, yet we can't have one lousy sentence that mentions an effort at cloning. don't worry, the inevitable miracle baby is a McGuffin, and you will finish the book no wiser as to how it was born after 25 years of barrenness. this is totally another novel about a middle-aged guy who is well-off but miserable anyway and doesn't know how to love (down to the dead child causing a broken marriage in his past, yawn) tarted up with setting and politics.

i just grabbed The Time Traveler's Wife off the shelf to read next...






*oh wow, David Morse has stopped writing and dedicated his life to Darfur. whoa.

a pretty good Major League Soccer player (under the salary cap) has about the same salary as a Senior Technical Writer. MLS has had a lot of financial trouble over the years and does not have the kind of deep pockets as an organization that the NBA, NFL, or even NHL has.

i keep returning to the comment thread on Scalzi's post about "pissy fans".

(short form: author writes giant multivolume novel, does not meet deadlines for next volume. he does, however, talk about all of his other projects and traveling. author gets upset about cranky fans who want him to stop doing other stuff and finish the book. other author/blogger defends first author.)

i'd say the comments are about 50/50 right now on whether or not fans have the "right" to be upset.

as others have said, George RR Martin has a serious PR problem. i have this hardcover book on my shelf that includes a bit from the author explaining that the book contains a polished half of a completed manuscript. so everyone who has read that book is thinking that GRRM has been editing part two of a completed manuscript since before 2005. if he hadn't set expectations, people would still be hopeful/frustrated rather than frustrated/angry. take a lesson from smarter software purveyors: make your new releases a happy surprise.

yes, people yelling at GRRM for watching football and going on vacation and saying "don't pull a Robert Jordan" are terribly rude and foolish. (i think the ones on about why he's spending time on other projects are still rude, but perhaps not so foolish.) i'm the first to lament crap product that gets pumped out in a rush to satisfy a clamoring public. a late product is late once (or over and over again as poor GRRM kept tossing new dates out there), a crap product is crap forever.

i think the core of the debate is who is doing who a favor here, and is a story a product? Scalzi and the names i recognize as authors in the comment thread seem to think they are doing a favor to readers by writing books. many of the readers seem to think that their book purchase is a favor to the author. is the author an artist, or a producer of a product? the reader is always a consumer. does the consumer have rights in regard to art? does the consumer have rights in regard to product?

the relationship between the reader and the author is certainly symbiotic; but is it mutualistic? still thinking.

and i want to know what happens next, GRRM.

ETA: Charlie Stross on same...comment thread developing.

nytimes has a feature on Mark Driscoll

Driscoll fills me with rage in a visceral way that even Focus on the Family can't touch. especially because he's spewing his misogynist crap from his stronghold in my neighborhood. (fun. as an example, i was going to link his classic blog post about how Ted Haggard wouldn't have been doing a male prostitute if his wife hadn't let herself go, but it's mysteriously been taken down. thank goodness for other christians who don't care about copyright.)

therefore, i'm amused that what is upsetting me the most after reading the article is that an avowed Calvinist would talk about how much he admires Martin Luther.

i have read several pieces that order me, as a woman with feminist values, to speak out against sexist or misogynist language used against Sarah Palin.

i disagree. i have held my tongue because i felt that friendship and civility were more valuable than engaging in a likely endless argument. but i'm really done here.

the language that has been used about her is remarkably similar to the language used about Dan Quayle, and i see no reason to treat her as anything other than a public figure, someone who happens to be under-informed and inexperienced, inept under pressure, and who holds policy positions that i consider to be odious.

i believe that she is anti-feminist. i will not offer her any support or protection because of mere biology. i certainly will not offer support or protection because of my feminist ideology.

“As a cold political calculation, I could not be more pleased,” McCain said, calling Palin “a direct counterpoint to the liberal feminist agenda for America” and asserting “she’s the best thing that could have happened to my campaign and to America.”

still hurt about Hillary? Palin is not going to kiss it better.

any woman who believes that electing McCain-Palin is in their best interest, or even a "lesser evil" than Obama-Biden is a fool.

maybe saying this is an unfriending offense. that's unfortunate.

only in America would someone complain in the same paragraph about the Constitution being shit upon while refusing to exercise the most important right we have as citizens.

any citizen who refuses to vote as a "conscientious objector" to the current electoral system, or because the available candidates are not just so, is engaging in an activity that has the exact same results as failing to vote out of apathy or disinterest. if you believe that the system is that broken and you actually care, then you need to be out in the world working to change it - not using your energy trying to convince people that your inaction is virtuous.

every citizen has the right to exercise or not exercise their franchise. they also have the right to free speech, and can complain as much as they like. they need to understand that anything a willful nonvoter has to say about elected officials has no weight with me.

when it comes down to it, i think more of extremists than nonvoters. even if i disagree with them, they are making an effort to be represented by their government.

Boing-Boing is not a personal website/blog. Boing-Boing is not equivalent to my LiveJournal.

it was a print zine before it was a website, and currently it makes enough money to have a full-time employee. that makes it a business, not a hobby or personal sandbox in my book.

i would say that the site has a collective editorial voice, and it is one that speaks very strongly for transparency and freedom of access to information. at least one of the editors is publicly critical of unannounced 1984-style changes to web pages.

therefore, mass unpublishing is bullshit. the most annoying thing is a group of people who showed previous evidence of intelligence being *confused* by the negative reaction.



google your own citations. i don't feel like lending them my meagre traffic right now.

tonight, we went out for BBQ on the way to another errand.

the iced tea was brewed tea, not a mix, and was a pleasant strength.

the service was adequate.

the mac and cheese was nearly tasteless and undersalted.

C's pulled pork was okay, but nearly cold.

i got ribs. they were covered in a rub that looked like it was made of spices but tasted like just salt. way way too much salt. the meat was dry, firm, and rubbery.

cornbread muffin? rock hard and had a gob of undermixed ingredients inside.

their sauces didn't help with the meat at all.




*sigh* so it looks like Ballard has no real BBQ joint. the Steel Pig and Rhodies are gone. any locals have a favorite for me to try? (i prefer "wet" over "dry", but the key thing for me is extremely tender meat, and sauce that i want to pour on my husband. good cornbread a major plus.)

Firefox 3 officially releases today.

i signed up to be part of Download Day, a push to set a Guinness record for software downloaded in 24 hours. start time 10am PST.

i'm hoping this is a sign of success: i can't get to mozilla.com or .org, firefox.com or .org, spreadfirefox...

*sigh*

EDIT 12:46pm: success!

for mrdorbin, in reference to this.

"Show me on the screenplay where Russell T. Davies touched you." - C

i love Doctor Who with all my heart. i welcomed the relaunched series with open arms, and i thank RTD for it. but i still have to hate him. we had some good times, but he likes to publicly humiliate my favorite franchise.

RTD isn't all bad as a show runner, but he's directly responsible for the worst writing and story arc decisions. ( spoilers ahead: ten things i hate about Who )

this is the super-short version. happy to discuss more, provide other examples, talk about the flaws in Casanova and Torchwood...

i have gotten to the point where i am really tired of Democratic primary season. the Democratic party is starving between two bales of hay. it has gone from exciting to grim for me, and i have a feeling that it's going to come down to the superdelegates and wrangling over Michigan and Florida.

and then there will be hard feelings. like there are already, where both sides seem to drill down to "if you support that candidate, you're stupid." i'm not stupid, and my friends aren't stupid for supporting another candidate.

i'll vote for any Democrat in the fall, because John McCain blew the last of his credibility with me when he voted against the Intelligence Authorization Act, which called for interrogation methods to follow the Army Field Manual (banning use of torture.) but he *did* have a chance with me, and please don't assume that everyone reading your blog thinks that every Republican politician eats babies.

if you want more independent voters like me to vote Democratic in November, DON'T CALL US STUPID OR ILL-INFORMED.

if you want to move me, tell me about voting records. tell me about the quality of their advisors, because i want to know about the kind of people they would choose for their cabinet and supreme court nominees. the rest is theater.

we bought a couple DVDs on the trip, Mulan and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. i saw both of them in the theater, and remember Hunchback in particular as being jawdroppingly beautifully made. (Hunchback gains big points for causing parents to carry screaming crying freaked-out children out of the cinema during both of my viewings. that's with the happier ending.)

they're still lovely. but wow, the whole a-cartoon-must-be-a-musical thing is terribly intrusive. years of Studio Ghibli and Brad Bird had flushed the idea out of my brain. the songs in Mulan are particularly jarring. (and Eddie Murphy. sigh.) the production numbers in Hunchback are annoying too. and that's sad, since Hellfire is so great, and so is God Help the Outcasts. (i seem to be in the minority on this one. i also don't care for The Lion King film. which isn't that surprising since i don't like Hamlet.)

i mentioned The Atrocity Archives elsewhere in lj-land today. i mention it again because it is tasty and good, managing to merge the experience of the put-upon IT person with spycraft and Lovecraft. it's a clever and fun read.

it was the book that got me to try Charles Stross again. every time i encountered one of his short stories in a magazine, i hated it. they were all full to the brim with five-minutes-ago technobabble hyperbole. lame. it was like he was the radiation-damaged love child of Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. (then again, perhaps this was all a knowing parody that flys right over my head. kind of like a modern audience trying to parse Armado in Love's Labour's Lost. feel free to explain it to me.)

we stayed at a hotel in Colorado that had a free books shelf. someone had added quite a bit of SF. there were several Stross books there (a fan, his publisher, him, dunno) so i finally picked up Accelerando, the award-winner.

aha. it's a collection of the stories i hated. i'm sure that they were better at their original publication date (Lobsters was published in 2001) but by 2007 their near-future has been curdled by reality, but yet not aged into the rich cheese of older near-futures that aren't. i tried valiantly to slog on, but found myself mostly marking passages to read aloud to C later. i like to listen to C laugh. i've passed it on to sinthrex. perhaps he will enjoy it more.

i finished Halting State not too long ago. it's fun, and a nice extrapolation of where portable information technology could take us. (definitely recommended for you WoW fans.) it's already nearing its pull date, so if you have any interest, i would ingest it before it's a mass market paperback. (web 3.14159? describing someone as looking like a character from The Matrix? *eyeroll*)

(as a side note: i started out loving Merchant Princes, but the last two books have been boring middles. dude needs a stiff edit, or to stop spewing out pages and rewrite, or permission to print fatter books, or something. world=awesome. Miriam=awesome. Miriam doing nothing to further the plot=lame. also, where is my Paulie?)

i wish i could sleep in on the weekends. i determined that i would skip Glitter to do just that, and then popped awake at 7am anyway.

i'm pretty confused about my health...after two days of listlessness and hacking cough, i was almost bouncy through last night's Star Wars game. then cruddy again this morning until C brought me coffee. now i'm sniffly, but not broken. um, okay. maybe i'm allergic to work.

the new Blade Runner cut is satisfying. locals are encouraged to see it on the really big screen. best surprise: Darryl Hannah's acting. Pris has very few lines, but there's a great deal transmitted before and after they're spoken. (i know that part of missing this previously was having a child's understanding of the film. the rest is getting to see a dimly lit film in a clean print on a big screen instead of on a television.) also, i had forgotten that Edward James Olmos' character has blue eyes. worst addition: extra gore. it's completely unnecessary and breaks the noir sensibility of the film. i'm looking forward to the DVD set. this was the first time i was asked to fill out a before-and-after audience survey. it appeared to be feeling out interest in a wider theatrical release, plus marketing choices. (the thing they failed to cover was the fact that i am still attached to the 1982 domestic cut and care most about getting the DVD set that includes it, even if it's just the chance to really compare them. it's why i hadn't thought about buying a DVD of the film up to this point. Highlander and Aliens are the only director's cuts i've seen that completely supersede the theatrical release.)

i bought drapes for the living room and hemmed them. i made myself a fleece scoodie. (see?) i really need to make myself finish the quilt that has to be done by the end of the month.

running the vacuum before people arrived last night felt way too good, like some Stepford-style tinkering with my brain.

i started reading Blood Meridian yesterday, but had to put it down. being deep into tech writing/editing mode apparently means that my brain rejects fiction that is chock-full of sentence fragments.

Dear Internets: okay, i can deal with NaNoWriMo ad nauseam for the anticipatory second half of October and all of November and then the navel-gazing of early December, but only if we stop the NaBlahBlahMo everything else. stop the camel-case. stop the portmanteau. reading, blogging, knitting...you suck. you suck like the people who made wearing a colored ribbon meaningless. you suck like the people who turned rubber bracelets into a fashion accessory.

thanks (i think) to sinthrex who turned us on to Yahtzee's reviews. it's so sad when you watch even if you don't care if you have played or will ever play the game. (pixxelpuss, check out the one for Peggle.)

i'm about halfway through The Poisonwood Bible. thus far, the story is one long litany of suck - our POV characters are fundy southerners trying to be missionaries in africa - where no main character goes anywhere, learns anything, changes, or is involved in the sweep of history. so what we get is another dysfunctional family story, spun by dropping it in an interesting setting, except that no one in the family is interested in the setting and it's told from their POV so i am not able to actually feel immersed in the thing that is unique about the book and enjoy it. yes, the white people don't understand africa and won't try. yes, the withering garden of seeds from the US is a metaphor. club me a few more times, it might not have penetrated.

i'm debating whether or not i want to finish it. the thing that is missing for me is that the family is humorless. as a reader, i have plenty of opportunities to laugh *at* them, but never a chance to laugh *with* them. it makes them inhuman, in a story i'm sure is intended to be more "true to life". the way that people deal with absurd hardship is that they recognize the absurdity and freaking laugh. it's how humans deal with overwhelming pain. there is some point where it bursts out. these people haven't laughed for over a year so far. i believe that humans can be this parochial, idiotic, self-centered, and single-minded, but i do not believe that they can take everything completely seriously every moment of every day. i'm wishing that some form of peril that is always looming around the edges (lions! malaria! crocodiles! revolutionaries! starvation! plague of insects!) would show up and put them out of their freaking misery.

so, for people who have read it, is something going to happen soon? (we're presently fleeing the ants, as a point of reference. the mirror is broken! OMG another vestige of civilization stripped away!) am i supposed to be enjoying it as a parable about exploitation?

i watched Lost Tales: Voices in the Dark so you don't have to.



*shudders*



fortunately, the ill effect was somewhat dulled by dinner, cupcakes, and company. i feel like we need to get some sage for markbourne and E's tv room.

i don't watch much television. C can stare glassy-eyed at the tube for hours as long as the show name starts with "Law & Order". as US cable viewers know, that means that he can watch tv all day.
he asked me to kill the cable for him. we agreed that "limited cable" would be okay if it gave us a better deal on the internet.

the cable bill says "contact us online". your comcast service account is not your comcast email account, but a separate username and password. once i understood that i had to do account creation even though i already have an account, their form would not accept my cable account number. and then when it looked like i had said the proper incantations, their servers were busy and i was instructed to try again later.

so i called the service number. where they told me the wait would be five to seven minutes. i sat down in front of the computer with the phone at my ear and chatted with mimerki to pass the time. 45 minutes later, the hold message changes from "your call is very important to us" to "please call during business hours". i called at 7:30, the offices closed at 8, fifteen minutes later the away message pops. i'm pissed.

i wait a few days. the phone system has changed. now they offer to hold my place in line and call me back. i'm dubious, but it works. the person on the phone is totally cool, does what i want, doesn't push hard on sales or hassle me. i get the limited package, because otherwise they add the same amount of money to your internet for not having bundled service. the dude tells me that the work will happen Friday, and it is all outside so no one needs to be home. score.

last night C tells me he got an automated call from comcast saying that someone has to be home from 2-6 Friday.

hate.

i wake up with a migraine this morning. i take drugs, but feel like ass. i give up and take a sick day, because by the time i feel better the cable guy will pull up outside, crimp some wires, and stuff a receipt in my door without talking to me.

(in other news, the pokeball gag gets me every time.)