Work is being workish and just dropped a ton more work on my head, on top of all the work I've been putting off because hey look over there, a procrastinabob! So the next couple days will be awful. Starting tonight.

And likely because of that I'm still in hiding-from-everything mode and don't want to do anything, and haven't revised a bit of my stupid deeply frustrating story. Which I wanted to have out the door by the time summer con season got started. GUESS WE BLEW THAT ONE.

And I go to the beach next week. Which would be awesome and relaxing but there will be work, and why will there be work? Because I felt stressed out and slacked off and didn't get it all done by now, that's why. Not to mention the packing and planning and non-work everything that needs to happen before we leave. Including figuring out how we're getting to SeaTac (current best answer: by Amtrak bus, getting us there IF EVERYTHING GOES RIGHT at 8:30 PM, half an hour away by transit for a 10:15 flight).

After that we'll be in Richmond (Va) for a couple of days and then in the DC area for a couple of days, and then we fly to Madison for Wiscon. Which will hopefully not suck, and will in any event be populated by a large number of awesome people I have not seen since October (or, in two fortunate cases, since March).

But the DC part is going to be rough because there is simply not enough time to see all the awesome people I want to see.

There's a Hokusai exhibit at the Sackler gallery, and since I just finished rereading Zelazny's only-female-main-character mood piece "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai" we are likely going to that on Monday. And dinner with my folks on Tuesday and working from work Tues and Weds and flying out of National on Wednesday night. Gah time.

And then after Wiscon I come home and go back to work, nominally relaxed and recharged and in reality just jetlagged and lonely.

---

Today I am grateful for the perfect weather, for being a beta-tester for Spectromancer for iPhone, for a handful of pretty kick-ass friends. For having a job that pays me to be where I want to be.

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So dating sims are apparently a thing, wherein you do a sort of choose-your-own-adventure and try to end up dating one of a number of people in the story. Hatoful Boyfriend is sort of a parody of that, only with pigeons. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. And you say "okay, pigeons, that's kinda weird," and I say YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW WEIRD IT IS. The link goes to an Actual Play thread with screencaps and, I mean, it just... gah. Look, that thread has twenty-one pages worth of posts (three playthroughs? four?), and then there's another one with another thirty-nine pages, and THE CRAZY JUST KEEPS COMING and it's making me CAPSLOCK because I have no other way to express how utterly bonkers this game is. It starts with the poster trying to get her character to hook up with the school doctor, and goes... just... look, just take the hit to your productivity and read it, okay?

Tangentially related, pet parrots, such as cockatoos, that are let loose in the wild are teaching native birds to talk. There is no way this ends well.

Race & Gender in D&D Art: "[T]o the credit of a number of people--artists, art directors, designers and editors alike--our disdain for [the generic white-male-fighter] Regdar made its way into a lot of art."

Ashley Judd is awesome. A sample: "When I have gained weight, going from my usual size two/four to a six/eight after a lazy six months of not exercising, and that weight gain shows in my face and arms, I am a 'cow' and a 'pig' and I 'better watch out' because my husband 'is looking for his second wife.' (Did you catch how this one engenders competition and fear between women? How it also suggests that my husband values me based only on my physical appearance? Classic sexism. We won't even address how extraordinary it is that a size eight would be heckled as 'fat.')"

Megaman as Malware: "Megaman’s actions make him seem less like the savior of mankind and more like an assassin hell-bent on destroying Dr. Wily’s creations and sabotaging his work. It’s important to note that in every game, Megaman’s actions are always preemptive strikes."

Via Charlie Stross, the economics of owning a tank.

On cooking, unintended side effects of: rushthatspeaks makes a carrot souffle, heptadecagram makes disasater cookies.

And finally, from Karawynn a month or more ago, How to eat a pomegranate (no bowl of water): as advertised. Now I want a pomegranate.

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In light of this NPR piece on the plethora of communication methods and the paralysis that they induce (thanks vvalkyri), I present:

( How to reach me )

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I do not need sixteen pounds of "light" wargame I will never get to play.

Heck, I already own well over sixteen pounds of OTHER "light" wargame I will never get to play.

But... I can put the box up on the top of the gameshelves where they meet at a corner and there's a dead space where things are likely to fall between them and be trapped forever, and it would block that off nicely. And it is an awfully pretty edition.

... I do not need sixteen hundred cubic inches of "light" wargame I will never get to play, not when I already have 2,150 cubic inches of "light" wargame I will never get to play.

ETA: in wholly unrelated news, sticking one's metaphorical pinkie in a metaphorical open flame still produces real burns. At least I know to pull back quickly and not put my entire hand in the fire.

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Last night's dreams were... confusing and fragmented, to say the least. I was constantly grieving for one or another of my current cats (who are very much alive) and/or Tommy the cat from my childhood who's been gone for almost fifteen years now. I also started dating someone who is in waking life a very casual online acquaintance, started a storm at sea that swamped a boat filled with tiny people who may or not have been other friends of mine, and somehow caused uilos to lose about half the green pearls off her necklace, about which I was a lot more upset than she was. O, brain.

Still somewhat stressed over work. Still not writing, other than the Upgrade Guide, which is not supposed to be fiction anyway. All that should let up in a week or so.

Finished eBear's Range of Ghosts yesterday. Quite good. Still, to paraphrase James Nicoll, I hope in my lifetime to see the death of the bound book-fragment mode of writing. It's all build-up for a story, albeit one that does at least have an end in sight (2014, I expect).

---

A couple of weeks ago I was talking with uilos trying to figure out what I wanted to do, since nothing felt at all interesting. She bounced a couple of ideas off me and I kept saying "no, that's not it."

"Well, do you want to... sit around and play video games?"

"I can't, because the old consoles don't connect well to the television and it's annoying to have that half-second lag and... and this is a 'can't' not a 'don't wanna.' Hm."

So I went out and bought a Wii, on the grounds that it'll play my existing Gamecube games. That and a component video cable seem to have done the trick. Whomped my way through Eternal Darkness again and felt a bit better about things.

As far as actual Wii games: I'm told I should get both Mario Galaxys and New SMB, and anything labeled Kirby as well. Zelda: Twilight Princess was pretty but after about halfway through, the sheer amount of running around not doing anything interesting has really turned me off it. (That and the terminally annoying fairy who hangs around and is smug about not telling you anything.) Metroid: Other M was... decent, but too frantic to really feel epic; I've got the Prime Trilogy on order. Anything I'm missing? Anything good on Virtual Console / WiiWare?

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Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

A very modern novel, and very strange throughout. E.g.: the narrator, who for much of the book cannot recall his own name, spends a great deal of time in conversation with his soul, who has no name; "For convenience I called him Joe." Filled with bicycles, questionable metaphysics, and footnotes and asides about the nonexistent works of a fictitious philosopher named De Selby. It doesn't say a whole lot, I think, but the way it says it is at least entertaining. I could hear O'Brien's Irish brogue in my head the entire time I was reading the book. I think I would have loved it to death had I the good fortune to encounter it in high school.

Saladin Ahmed, Throne of the Crescent Moon

Fantasy derived from Arabic cultures rather than European, featuring an old wizard and his young paladin sidekick. Light and fun. It reminded me a great deal of the Master Li & Number Ten Ox books, and of Lloyd Alexander's The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha. If you're in the market for a popcorn fantasy novel you could do a lot worse; if you're looking for something substantive, this is unlikely to do the trick. Unfortunately I'm mostly looking for substance in my fiction these days. I get all the fluff I need from television. Speaking of which...

Ronald D. Moore (dev.), Battlestar Galactica: Season 1

Military SF concerned with how the military system can coexist with the civilians it's there to protect. Individual episodes range from "okay" to "pretty good;" nothing's blown me away yet, and the things that I've objected to aren't so problematic that I'll stop watching. The humans and the episode-to-episode plots are good. Big problems that I can foresee include 1) the religio-mysticism is currently getting on my third-to-last nerve and seems to be growing more prevalent, and 2) I cannot see any rhyme or reason to the Cylons' actions. (As a friend said, "There are many copies, and they have a plan... but the writers don't.")

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Leah Bobet, Above

I didn't really know what to expect from Above going into it. That may be the best way to go in, honestly. So: Above is a contemporary YA urban fantasy that is, to quote the author, "about complicated, tangled, late-stage Growing Up. And people with crab claws. And living shadow-creatures. And a girl who turns into a honeybee, and a boy who grew up underground." And if that interests you at all then you should read it. Now.

( ... )

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PSA: I'm told that Korra Nation has the first two episodes of the new Avatar series for viewing. I say "I'm told" because all I get is a redirect to the Facebook page, presumably because they're prejudiced against Canadian IP addresses. Will have to actually install/configure Tunnelbear this week.

(Other television thoughts await their own post, because they are legion.)

Hunger Games: it turns out I read the books mostly for Katniss's internal monologue, so the (decently-written, decently-acted, well-filmed except for the overuse of Shakycam) movie didn't do as much for me as I'd hoped. Mildly curious as to how coherent it was for someone who hadn't read the books.

("You know what they call the Hunger Games in France? Battle Royale with Cheese.")

Weekend Seattle trip: no time for shopping, alas, but we did have some amazing sushi with a couple of writers I met at Rainforest. I'm still pleasantly surprised when I can hang out with people I barely know for two-plus hours and feel like the conversation could easily go another two, or six, or days.

But there was a Girlyman show to get to, which was the original reason for coming down. I'd sprung for the extra $5 for Really Good Seats right up front; this meant that when the clog-dancer came out for "Kittery Tide" I had an up-close and personal view of her shoes.

They played most of the songs from the new album, "Supernova." Hearing them live does make me like the album more, but I'm still only so-so on it. Which is okay; they still do my favorite live shows, and I'll happily go see them whenever they're nearby.

Otherwise, eh. Been feeling the need for comfort reading lately. Not entirely sure what's going on with that. (Man, this whole "being a grownup" thing just never stops, does it?)

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It seems that I'm able to get things done when I make a list of what I want to get done today. Bleh. Guess it's 'bout time to tackle my long-standing mental block against making lists of things I need to do. Such as a linkdump.

Have I mentioned Ask culture and Guess culture? I don't think I have. I'm Guess culture and I mostly hate it. Even knowing it's there I catch myself saying "Hey, do you want to X" or "We could X" instead of "I'd like to X" and similar.

Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up: a very funny edited-together vid of Mr Romney "rapping." ("My dog / is on / the roof" etc)

Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code: "In reality, everything about the game has been carefully designed to control payouts and entice the consumer. Of course, these elaborate design elements mean that the ticket can be undesigned, that the algorithm can be reverse-engineered."

Tweet Directory. Via Jmac, who aptly called it "The Library of Babel, at Twitter-scale."

John Fairfax, Who Rowed Across Oceans, Dies at 74: "At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle. At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate."

Six-legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides for 80 Years: I love just about everything about this story. (Trigger warning for, well, giant freaking beetles.)

Batman vs. the Pickup Artist: "And then there's what I have dubbed The Art Gallery Scheme, a con so sinister, time-intensive and Machiavellian that it's like a deathtrap the Riddler would build if he was trying to bang a sorority girl." This... is kind of astounding.

Forget Your Past: images of what ought to have been Ernst Stavro Blofeld's secret hideout.

Paris Review interview with John McPhee: "But each day, nevertheless, when you try to get started [writing] you have to transmogrify, transpose yourself; you have to go through some kind of change from being a normal human being, into becoming some kind of slave. I simply don’t want to break through that membrane. I’d do anything to avoid it. You have to get there and you don’t want to go there because there’s so much pressure and so much strain and you just want to stay on the outside and be yourself. And so the day is a constant struggle to get going."

Also, holy cow there's an interview with Chip Delany, and John le Carré, and Haruki Murakami, Hunter S. Thompson, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino... okay, I'm officially impressed. And likely to spend a great deal of time sifting through these.

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Because posting to DW is easy, even when other writing is hard, and because it's even easier when someone tells me what to post about.

(a very funny comic that bears no relation to anything, except maybe the title of this post)

"Comment to this post and I will list seven things I want you to talk about. They might make sense or they might be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself."

(via rebelsheart)

( Stupid, stupid rat meme! )

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Given: Bookshelf space is a serious consideration for housing. We got unbelievably lucky with the place we're in right now but it's bloody expensive, and we may not be so fortunate in the next place.

Also, books are the great majority of the physical objects I own. If I'm looking to reduce the amount of Stuff in my life (and I usually am; the "do not have any attachments" pattern is locked in eternal conflict with the "might be useful someday" pattern), books are a place to start.

Hence: the possibility of going over to ebooks for the small portion of the library available in that format plus anything new that comes out.

The imminent release of the new iPad is doubtless a small factor in pondering this possibility.

Pros: Less space, obviously. Being able to buy books immediately as I want to read them may (may) curtail the need to Buy All The Books whether or not I have time to read them. (Case in point: acquired "Throne of the Crescent Moon" this weekend, but gord only knows when it'll slot into the stack.) Not as much having to haul a giant hardback around because it's what I'm in the middle of (e.g., Anathem). Ereading is likely to lend itself to reading more online magazines & contemporary short stories.

Cons: Love of the physical experience of reading a paper book. Fear of lost data. The visible library is a defining feature of Home. Another %&$ device that needs to be plugged in. Can't loan ebooks to people who don't have an ereader. Many older works are unavailable as ebooks, leading to frustration. Need to find an ereader acceptable to uilos as well as one for me, otherwise she'll just buy dead-tree copies of anything I pick up in ebook that she wants to read too.

Unknowns: The biggest factor is how well I'll like reading on an ereader / tablet / what have you. (Already known: how well I like reading on the Device, that being "not very," but that's a function of the tiny screen.) How much of a problem the confusion of "do i have that in ebook or dead-tree" will be. How much of a problem DRM will be, though I anticipate "not much."

Thoughts?

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I've been out here writing for three days, more or less. In that time I have:

• polished and submitted "Bookwyrms"
  
• half polished "In the City of Memory" (formerly "voice")
  
• written another half scene and done a bit of plot noodling for "Southbound"
  
• gotten halfway unstuck on "One Only"
  
• started writing another Bookwyrm story

I've also visited Forks, WA; learned that not everyone who says "yeah i'll read your story and get back to you" actually will; almost been solicited for an anthology (and if I'd had a sale already I would have been; to the left, that's just based on being here with the editor, so not as impressive as it sounds); listened to talks on outlining, plot vs story, and how to read aloud; and hung out with Klagor, Nicole, Amanda, and various people I didn't know before this week.

It's been fun but I'm not entirely convinced it's my thing. Still feeling a touch isolated, still not confident or comfortable enough to break through that. I may do better just taking a weekend off by myself every so often and holing up in a cabin or hotel room or whatever. But it /has/ been good to meet the people I've met, and to spend some time around other writers. Will think on it.

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Ralph Fiennes (dir.), Coriolanus

( Imagine Ian McKellen's Richard III with no sense of humor. )

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Complaints of xpost failure have been coming through; let's see if this one makes it.

Wrote the Last Lousy Fifty Words of the bookwyrms story last night. (Give or take a couple hundred, what with actually writing transitions and making the ragged edges of scenes meet properly instead of [[[DOWNSTAIRS]]] or [[[CAN'T DO THAT]]] or just leaving a bunch of whitespace.) It got a first-read response of "adorable," which is good enough. I'll let it sit for awhile and revise it early next week, and then I guess I submit the thing to its designated anthology.

I'd still like to be writing longer pieces (this one clocks in at 1500 words) but hell, two stories drafted is twice what I had for all of last year.

This evening I hop a train to Seattle, on which I shall Relax and also do the reading for the Commie Pinko Writing Contest. And tomorrow I'm off to the Rainforest Writers' Retreat in the company of Nicole and Klagor and what I presume are a variety of other cool people. I have no idea what I'm going to work on while I'm there. Maybe I ought to brainstorm/outline one of these ideas I've got lying around. Maybe that'll get me writing something more substantial.

---

Unrelated to writing, it'll be good to get away for awhile. The main advantage of a long-distance relationship wasn't so much that it provided opportunities for random travel; rather, it provided opportunities for random travel without my partner. I love uilos dearly but we're both at home All The Time. After nine months with only a week and a half break for VP I'm starting to get twitchy for some sustained Me Time.

I could also do with some time when I'm not expected to be staring at work, I expect. Brain is slowly leaking out my ears.

---

Linkspam, loosely media-related edition.

Liam Neeson versus, well, everything, from "Wolves" to "Outdated Ideas About Sexuality," with a stopover at "The Bastard English" ("aren't there actually two of those?").

Very tangentially related, A History of Ireland in 100 Excuses. Via Crooked Timber, where Maria notes, "It’s almost impossible to cherry-pick because half of the fun is the cumulative effect, and the other half is they’re so damn funny." (For linguistics geeks, an explanation of #10, and further amusement.)

TV Is Broken: "Did it break?" "No. It's just a commercial." "What's a commercial?"

Against Big Bird, the Gods Themselves Contend in Vain, in which scott_lynch re-encounters the best Sesame Street special ever, Don't Eat the Pictures. "[I]t's plain that we've had Big Bird figured all wrong. He's no kindergartener. He's a previously unknown aspect of the Eternal fucking Champion."

The Star Wars Saga: Suggested Viewing Order. Brilliant. (My preferred viewing order is "IV," but I'm in the minority that doesn't care much for Empire on account of how it's not a complete story.)

rbandrews notes that "someone at w00t harbors dreams of being a slipstream writer."

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Posts I have been intending to write for awhile now, and may or not get to:

• Medialog, Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus
  
• Medialog, Flann O'Brian's The Third Policeman
  
• Medialog?, Burn Notice S1 vs Leverage S1
  
• What I have been and will soon be up to
  
• On the uselessness of role-playing books
  
• On having a close friend again (mostly by accident, as these things tend to be), and some implications thereof
  
• And a month and a half of linkspam, probably broken up among several posts.

Soon, grasshopper.

---

So apparently it's National Book Day? Or at least World Book Day in the UK. Good enough excuse for one of them question meme things, this one via mrissa.

The book I'm reading: Warren Ellis's Ellisian noir Crooked Little Vein, on loan from semilocal J--. Roger Zelazny, Collected Stories v.5: Nine Black Doves. I've had a bookmark in the front of Kushner & Sherman's The Fall of the Kings for months now. I suppose I can be said to have given up on truepenny's Corambis since it's been six months since I touched it. (Too much all at once; binged on the first three volumes and then my brain said "okay done now" around page 50.)

Books I'm writing: um. The last time I looked at "Junkyard Dog" I thought it might actually be a YA novel, or a novella with a YA protagonist. And I don't think "One Only" is a novel but there's one (at least) in that universe. Etc.

The book I love the most: gah. If you held a gun to my head I'd say Heat of Fusion And Other Stories by John M. Ford, at least today.

The last book I received as a gift: Vancouver Special by Charles Demers, an Xmas gift from uilos.

The last book I gave as a gift: Clark Ashton Smith's Red World of Polaris, to uilos for Xmas. She had very nice things to say about the quality of the book. The prose contained within seems to have been, um, for Smith completists.

The nearest book: A large paperback edition of Hesiod (Theogony, Works and Days, Shield), because the Misc shelf (top to bottom: poetry, cooking, Greeks + drama, more drama, lit-crit / writing advice / The Guide To Getting It On, oversized art books) is in the office behind me. If you go with "book that's not shelved," it's Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, which I picked up along with The Third Policeman a few weeks ago.

The book I want someone else to please write for me: I'm still looking for something like "A History of Vancouver, 1960-2010." The Demers book was close but not quite; it's more focused on contemporary Vancouver and only incidentally touches on how it got that way.

---

Links, visual. Videos or comics or images.

The Lumarca: a short film of "a low-cost visualization project." Gorgeous.

This record player reads tree rings instead of LPs.

Darkness: "My roommate is dark... Sometimes you meet people like that, they have one adjective that fits them like a glove."

Old school screensaver.

Some self-assembly required.

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Elseweb a friend asked about personal hinge points, of the "if you could go back and do one thing differently, what would it be?" variety.

Most of the poor decisions I've made were the best decision I could have made at the time. As noted elsewhere, I lacked the tools to make better ones. To have chosen differently or better I would have had to be a different person. This rules out such obvious choices as "don't nearly fail out of college" or "don't give up on writing for the better part of a decade."

Having said that, there are one or two places things could have gone differently. ( For example... )

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Words: 1008
Total words: 2053
Neat things: Spitting on a hologram. Being responsible for an entire city.

Reports from the front:
10 AM: DRAFTKILL COMMENCING.
3 PM: Well, this isn't the story I thought I was writing, but given the trouble that one was giving me I'm okay with this.
6 PM: Right on schedule: 100% plotted, 75% written, 99% sure it sucks.
8 PM: Hey, that's a draft. How'd that happen? Now to revise.
10 PM: Alpha-read, lightly revised, and sent. What a day

I dunno, man. I sat down at ten this morning intending to come out the other side of today either with my story or on it. After not getting anywhere for about an hour I came up with a different plot altogether, and got the whole shape of that one, and then it was mostly just typing it up.

I don't know what I've learned from this. External deadlines motivate me like nothing else, but I knew that. I can in fact still come up with a story when pushed; that's good to know, though I'd rather it were a bit less stressful. Part of why I couldn't get anywhere with the original plot was a vagueness as to what happens when... but I knew what the next scene was, and I couldn't just write it and find out what happens next from there. Maybe my process has changed. I don't know that I approve if it has, although if it stops me from writing twenty pages of buildup so that I know what happens in the three pages of plot it's a net positive.

Also, the suck in this one is localised to a pair of conversational exchanges. Too bad that one of them sets up the whole emotional payoff, and the other is that payoff. Oh well. Only way to learn is to fail, and the next one will be differently bad.

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Words: 227
Total words: 1084
Neat things: Raptured nerds sent to colonize / strip-mine a planet; the job's done when they get things up and running well enough to build a spaceship to get them back off again.

Blarg rant can't write words stuck whine blarg. Used to be able to write and write and write and look up and work out where it was going and write some more, and the process was painful but at least it got somewhere. Now that's good for maybe a few hundred words; after that I work out where it's going and I still can't write it. Spent all afternoon and much of the evening not writing this, trying to bash out the plot/structure I've got. Success was what they call "limited," or maybe "minimal."

This is the third thing running (VP story, Bookwyrms, this) where momentum carries me through a perfectly decent opening scene and then I freeze up on writing anything beyond that. The last two I managed to turn that opening scene plus a bit more into a 1500-word vignette but I don't want to write vignettes. Except apparently I do, or something.

At this point I am seriously out of ideas as to what is wrong with me. I guess I write vignettes until I either figure out how I can write something with more meat to it, or give up.

Blarg.

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Today is... ah, screw it. Seventeen years running is about long enough, and February up here is pretty decent all in all.

Happy Emperor's Birthday (observed). And if someone thrice offers you a kingly crown you may as well accept it; they'll stab you and eulogize you as "ambitious" regardless.

... then again, OKC started using banner ads this morning, The first one's for Smirnoff Whipped Cream. OKC may have just entered the "too creepy to use" pile.

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... running a Technoir game on Thursday nights, for uilos, semilocal J--, and M-- who physically reminds me a great deal of Andy "Not the President" Jackson. Character creation... I'd like to say it went well, and maybe it did, but it also involved a great deal of flailing about on my part because I'm not all that familiar with the system and I didn't have a Transmission printed up and ready to go. Still, I'm looking forward to the first real session next week.

The whole concept of Transmissions (insta-plot generators) is bloody brilliant and may have been designed expressly for my GMing style. A given Transmission contains a page-long description of the city it's set in and six lists of six items each: contacts, events, objects, factions, locations, and threats. Contacts (NPCs the PCs have some relationship with before the game starts) and threats (smaller than factions; usually 3-6 NPCs who'll be opposing the PCs in some way) are fleshed out and given stat blocks; the others get a sentence or two and maybe some tags (system-specific attributes). I randomly add three of these items to a plot map during character creation and brainstorm connections between them. Then any contacts that the PCs call on for favors during chargen get added to the plot map as well. As the game goes on, the PCs lean on their contacts for information, the contacts get connected to other plot nodes and bring in additional random plot nodes themselves, and I tie it all together in a coherent fashion. The hard part, as usual for me, will be knowing when to stop adding nodes and start moving towards wrapping it all up.

... through the first season of Leverage, which was great fun. The pilot and the two-part season finale are some excellent television and the rest of the season didn't suck either. Good inspiration for a cyberpunk game. Parker and Hardison make me inordinately happy, too, and it's so very nice to have a show where I don't dislike any of the main characters.

... writing a story in the space of two weeks for a contest, in the hope that external deadlines will motivate me more than self-imposed ones and/or this story won't run into whatever it is the Bookwyrms one did. Already got a setting, a plot, and some events that are pulling the story in a completely different direction. Business as usual.

Is there a word or phrase for the kind of TV/movie SF that involves brightly-colored diaphanous robes and buildings made of featureless white stone with glowing crystals and control panels inside? Ray guns and blocky silver robots may be involved as well. It's not exactly atompunk / Raygun Gothic, or maybe it's a narrow subset of that aesthetic.

... making a habit of going on not-dates with women after they've said, for varied and excellent reasons, that they don't want to date me. (In other news, two! and it's not even Valentine's Day yet.) I'm mostly okay with this development. I've very much missed one-on-one conversations with people I trust other than uilos.

... laughing my fool head off, in a combination of admiration and self-recognition.

... very tired. Goodnight Gracie.

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