Author Archives: Kelson
There Wolf
Fedora 8 has just been released, code-named “Werewolf.” As is tradition for this particular Linux distribution, the official release announcement is accompanied by an alternative, humorous announcement playing off the code name.
This time, the joke announcement is a song parody of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” And unlike a lot of really bad filk I’ve seen (online and otherwise), it’s surprisingly not bad (for all the subject matter is a bit odd. At least, from what I remember of the original song, it scans.
Londo/G’Kar in 2008!
This just showed up in my email from Babylon 5 Scripts:
From JMS’s Cafe Press store (the same site through which he’s selling his script books with commentary):
With the coming 2008 elections, there aren’t a lot of candidates we can agree upon. So as a public service, we are now providing a slate of candidates that will bring the country together in common cause and preserve many of this nations’ finest electoral traditions.
Slates available include Londo/G’Kar, G’Kar/Londo, and Zathras/Zathras (trained in crisis management!)
I remember having an unofficial Sheridan/Ivanova ’96 (or possibly Sheridan/Delenn) bumper sticker, but I’m fairly certain it was a homemade “Elect The Brain” (as in Pinky and the…) sticker that I actually put on my car that year.
Now if only they’d used the correct punctuation on the ’08 instead of trusting smart quotes. (That should be an apostrophe, not a left single quote.)
Fire-ony
Five years ago, Mozilla was forced to rename the Phoenix web browser because Phoenix Technologies was working on an in-BIOS browser that would let you get on the internet and troubleshoot/download drivers/etc. even if your operating system was trashed. It became Firebird, and then Firefox. The Phoenix product has finally been released. Ironically, it’s evolved into an embedded Linux distro that runs…Firefox.
Nanomore
Decided that with everything else that’s going on, I don’t have time for the added stress of Nanowrimo right now. Last night I didn’t even mess with the Flash-related projects that have been looming (way behind on current stuff for my site, and I’m contributing an article to the TwoMorrows Flash Companion book). All I did was catch up on comics & blogs and watch Heroes. It was amazingly relaxing.
Ah, well. I know I can do it, since I finished last year. And I’ll probably write some more on this story, in which case I’ll keep updating my profile. But I’m not going to worry about writing 1,700 words a day, or finishing 50,000 words this month.
I won’t have a new novel at the end of the month, but I’ll be a lot less stressed out dealing with everything else.
T-Shirt Irony
Had lunch at South Coast Plaza yesterday. (And yes, they had the ceiling stars of doom up again.) When I was a kid, it was just a mall, but over the years it’s evolved into an über-trendy mall full of designer stores that supposedly attracts tourists from all over. A few months ago they opened a Bloomingdale’s.
At said Bloomingdale’s, I saw a T-shirt with a list of things one can do to protect the environment. Recycle, use less water, turn off electronics when not in use, drive less, etc. Just for kicks, I looked at the price tag: $62.
So basically, it’s a shirt that discourages conspicuous consumption, but buying it is conspicuous consumption.
Oddly enough, when I wanted to show it to Katie, I couldn’t find the display. The floor is divided into tiny little nooks for each designer, all identical except for contents, and while I probably just couldn’t find the right section, I had the disturbing sense that someone had come in behind me and replaced the T-shirt display with a shelf full of jeans. ($175 jeans, of course.)
I was able to find the display of T-shirts with Transformers, various super-heroes, Ghostbusters and other graphics that ran from about $38 to $45. These would go for $15–25 in most places. I also saw several people wandering around the mall wearing these Ghostbusters T-shirts, and I had to wonder how many of them were wearing them because they had fond memories of the film or cartoon, and how many were wearing them because they were on sale at Bloomingdale’s.
Writing Slowdown
Well, days 2–3 of Nanowrimo haven’t gone quite as well as day 1. Thursday night I found myself stuck, unable to get past about a paragraph for hours. I was convinced that what I had wasn’t really a story, wasn’t interesting, that all I had was a weird concept and a bunch of people who would be doing research for 50,000 words. Finally I decided to just pick up another section of the story. That got me through 3,401, putting me just over the baseline goal, but not until 1AM.
Then on Day 3 I tried to do some Flash updates before picking up the novel. I needed to look up a URL, and got distracted by the TV Tropes Wiki. It’s just as insidious as Wikipedia, and I lost several hours just reading through it. In the end, I only got one of the two Flash updates I’d wanted to post, and with dinner and grocery shopping, I didn’t get started writing until around 9:30.
Because Nanowrimo measures your daily progress by the time you update your word count, it’s possible to write several thousand words in a day but have it show as nothing because you managed to post it after midnight. I actually got bitten by that once last year, so I make an effort to update whenever I finish a session, and several times in an evening. Unfortunately, the site was down yesterday evening. I kept checking, and was lucky that it came back up around 11:30, at which point I kept updating every 10 minutes as I got closer and closer to 5,000. I finally hit it just at midnight, so depending on how closely their clock matches mine, I may have been officially back on track for day 3.
Word count: 5009