Saturday, December 19, 2009

Snowed In! The blogpost

Because I have been snowed out today - even before the snow came down - with a gallon of hot assam black and sushi I walked ten blocks for, I thought I would update my blog.

Firstly, I am going to make a shirt that plays lip-service to the doomsayers of NYC:

Create your own banner at mybannermaker.com!

It is cold, though. And I've been warming up with Farscape - wondering what I was smoking in 1998 when I forsook that spectacular series for Lexx on Friday nights (outside of how incredibly good looking Michael McManus as Kai is) - and some more new musics. And my very first naughty phone call! When I figure out how to get it off my cell phone voice mail box and into a format I can share with the world, I will do so. This is even better than the three foot menorah car and the spaceship I thought I saw last night. And unlike either of the aforemention, far far more portable.

On Thursday and Friday, my associate in cataloging crime, Miss L and I were busy shifting books and recompiling databases and drinking earl grey tea while listening to Pandora. Miss L has, by means accessible to the world at large, created two really awesome playlists. But one of them based on Say Hello to Your Mother (who I thought was Bright Eyes for a while) spawned the song "Photograph" by Adam Payne. I love this song. I can't find it in any sort of shareable media. I finally found it on Reverbnation and highly, highly recommend listening to it.

I liked the lyrics (as in really feeling for the plight of Adam Payne's protagonist): I don't want to hear about the guy you met last night, how you believe this has got to be the one. You don't want to hear about the dream I had last night. About the two of us, you know I'll have another one.

Miss L and I discussed Kierkegaard (the philosopher) and how weird it is to be involved with people we like like (i.e. love, or some sort of thing we think is love) despite there being no reciprocal liking. It was very interesting as apparently Kierkegaard was a victim to this same complaint (loving someone who had married someone else - but continued to have a pseudo-relationship with) and created a whole philosophical system on it! I am not nearly that ambitious. Mostly 'cause if someone told me they didn't like me (by word or deed) I would move out of their lives posthaste (ironically, this is my theme of 2009!).

I am also pondering whether I can morally buy this shirt from Threadless despite my one person boycott until they print something by queenmob. I think if I just think about John Crichton, I should be ok, despite the fact that the shirt inspired this guy to wield a chainsaw!!!

And festively here is one of my favorite Xmas songs:



I like this version because she is the only one who sings the line, "until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow." I've always thought it was more true than other Christmas songs - if that means anything.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Harddrive Deaths & Other Mysteries of Life

Ever since finishing NaNo on November 30th, I have been having inspirational deliriums that are seriously waking me up from a sound sleep! Or keeping me from sleeping at all. Dreams about a Fae named Arsar and souls caught to bodies and Restoration astrologers and Rune-Earls – seriously, I have no idea where this shit comes from. Probably the same place where Vamperace, the Vampire Liberace, came from and some plans for a Dungeons & Dragons 4.0 0-Level series of games I hope to run early next year featuring Yuan-Ti and spice and Girth Bi'ttoms and his daughter, Maythee.

But mostly I keep dreaming about Arsar and his human foil, Rhys. For NaNoWriMo, the character of Anne sort of haunted me for a few months. Since my mind ticks and purrs all the time, I sort of have to trick it into letting me go to sleep, so I make up stories before going to bed. One night, a blonde woman in a black mid-Victorian dress (probably based on Irene Forsyth) turned around in a room lit by sunlight, only slowly revealing her face as I waited for her to turn. She was being introduced to someone – but I had no idea who it was. She turned into Anne Edwardes – who is currently lost until I can scare up a USB harddrive enclosure to rescue her.

I am officially an idiot. Seriously.

The harddrive on my newish (6 months old) laptop blew up on me Saturday morning – as in the blue screen of death and all that heart wrenching madness. As a measure of my insane priorities, all of my music is on my external harddrive and fine... but not my NaNo novel! Or my FanFix Chapter 16 – and seriously I don't know if I have the stamina to rewrite that. Or the notes I had made about my very slowly evolving zombie love story and a couple pages of notes I had taken after waking up from my dream about Arsar. I was sort of frantic – particularly as I don't think I can function as a human being without internet access (I think I was born to exist in the world of Shadowrun) – and after trying to boot XP off the disc and running diagnostics realized it was pretty much a lost cause. Thankfully, I spent a pleasant two hours on the phone with Dell, only fifteen of those minutes with a gentleman who kept calling me 'Mum,' who was extraordinarily impressed that I hadn't threatened to climb through the phone and rip his head off. So they're sending me a new harddrive and after scouring listservs and forums, realized that I might be able to rescue Anne Edwardes and other things. For now, she is doubling as the Lady of Shalott – behind some faulty electronic circuitry, plastic casing and a polyethelene bag.

Thankfully my older laptop – a Latitude 110L that had been taking up space in my dresser – had been completely reformatted after an unfortunate and lingering malady was able to serve in my newer computer's stead. Although the Latitude doesn't have a DVD drive and weighs at least four-hundred pounds. And didn't have a LAN driver or updates that took two days to complete. But with the aid of Lena, I was able to get that taken care of. I get a big golden star for solving my own networking problems almost completely on my own – although I may have ripped out some hair in the process.

Because I can't stop thinking about Arsar and apparently have completely lost the ability to write in longhand, I have started putting thoughts and thoughts and more thoughts down in bytes. That I am backing up in at least four places. Four places not on this computer.

I also started re-reading the Harry Potter series, although I'm currently obsessed with Kristin Cashore's Graceling. I want Kristin Cashore to write me 2,000 pages of just Po and Katsa together beating up people and living and doing things that they would do – there doesn't even have to be a plot, just lots of pages of the characters doing normal life things. Since I am in love with Po (of Graceling), I would give anything to be able to write a character that I actually lost myself to in reading it. When I write things, I have a hard time dropping into the prose without having to fix it or just seeing words and sentences. I think it's because I already know what is going to happen and I love to be completely surprised (although, understandably, in good ways rather than bad) when reading a story. Now if only Patrick Rothfuss would finish the sequel to The Name of the Wind. I also love Kvothe – and I am dying, literally dying to know more about Kvothe's life before becoming an “evil” magician.

That and getting my hands on a physical copy of Piers Anthony's On a Pale Horse without having to buy it. Simple things, really. But important to me.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

[New Music] The Republic Tigers & The Stereotypes & Rocky Votolato

Recuperating from NaNoWriMo (and having actually written 5K more words on a project I was on the fence about completing, *oh well*) and listening to lots of Pandora.

Because I'm inundated with new music all the time, I thought I would throw up three of my latest finds so I don't forget about them (and hope to get an iTunes gift card for Xmas although I don't deserve one).

Firstly, Toto-incarnate: The Republic Tigers. Like the Kooks, I'm not keen on all of their stuff, but I was listening to Buildings and Mountains and got this whole Toto Africa vibe from them. As Toto's Africa is my absolute favorite song in the history of songs, they didn't need to do much else to win me over. Listen for yourself:



And Toto:



Next is San Diego's The Stereotypes. Particularly the amazing, amazing song All My Life. I can't find it on YouTube, but their MySpace has the song. Apparently, they are singlehandedly fronting all the music for TV - if their page is to be believed. Ironically, however, when seeking it out, I found a song I used to listen to in Japan (Japanese MTV was a crazy and awesome thing - particularly as it was filtered via Australia to my ADSL box at the time):





And lastly Rocky Votolato - who I was pretty sure was going to end up being from New York with a surname like Votolato. Instead, a Seattle institute of sorts. A very nice voice. And apparently every song I end up liking on Pandora is his.

For example:





This is probably the most fragmented blog entry ever, but I'm a little typing-ed out. I promise to do better at an undefined point in the future.