Category: Digital Neighbors

Apparently I define myself by bloggers

August 20, 2003 /

Coincidentally, my farewell lunch was scheduled for the same day as Emma’s, and my last day would have been the same too–except I’m not leaving after all. I’m going to keep working here part-time, Mondays and Fridays, with class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’m counting on that break in the middle of the week forcing me to get some work done.

This wasn’t a decision lightly reached. I talked about it to three people I respect a great deal–Sumana, Maria, and (the other) Emma (from GSP 2001)–and finally came around to staying after a lot of thought. This isn’t my dream job, but it’s a good job. My next best option would be a possible opening at The Great Escape, a really neat comic / music store on Bardstown Road, but a) it’d pay less, b) I’d have to have a driver’s license and c) it wouldn’t look nearly as good on my resumé.

So I’m going to get to know the people here a little better, and I’m going to pay my crap-programming dues, and I’ll be able to breathe a little easier financially. I’m going to be putting a big chunk of my pay into a savings account every month, and that account is going to be reserved for exactly one thing–Amtrak, California, Comic Con, Stephen Maria Lisa Will (Ian?) Sumana Leonard Graham next summer. You gotta believe!

August 8, 2003 /

It’s the Talk To a Terrifyingly Quick Standup Comic in California on the Phone Game!

  • Premise: You have been contacted by email and phone, so as to double the super top secretness of a responsibility with which you have been entrusted. After such secretness is secured, your contact will call you back later and you’ll end up talking for like an hour.
  • Imagine the conversation as a cooperative race, in which the object is not to reach a finish line, but rather to match pace with the other conversant.
  • For the purposes of this scenario, you have an old bicycle, the one from when you lived in Georgetown. It has pink flowers on it, and one squeaky training wheel that likes to make you turn right.
  • Meanwhile, Sumana has a street-illegal Ferrari.
  • Sumana is a kindly driver, and will cruise along comfortably halfway up the gear train, in eighth. You will attempt to pedal along at speeds matching her train (er, car) of thought; if you were on a real bicycle and not a metaphorical one, this would cause your tires to sublimate.
  • Now–and this is important–try to make it look easy.
  • Seriously, I did get to talk to one of my role bloggers on the cellular telephone last night. Layla cut us off a couple of times (I think she was cranky, and maybe jealous), but it was still pretty great, and my face hurt from smiling afterwards.
  • I think I’m going to have to make a California road trip next summer after all, and hit San Francisco and LA and of course San Diego. Sumana recommended Amtrak, which could totally be a week’s worth of party. Stephen, Maria, you guys still up for Comic Con?
  • Oh, right, the topic and such.

Thanks for playing the Talk To a Terrifyingly Quick Standup Comic in California on the Phone Game!

Leonardr like lightning!

July 28, 2003 /

Says Mister Crummy, regarding this last entry:

“The obvious thing that comes to my mind is ‘3001’ by Arthur C. Clarke, which is an awful book but which features, among other things, tame, semi-intelligent velociraptors who do menial tasks like gardening. This is just an incidental detail which is not important to the story, but it’s portrayed as a good deal for everyone including the no-longer-extinct dinosaurs…

Another one is David Brin’s Uplift series, in which one type of genetic engineering (making semi-intelligent species fully intelligent) is seen as a social good and a duty. Some of the characters in the books are genetically engineered chimps and dolphins.

If a piece of technology is central to a science fiction story then usually something has to go wrong or the technology has to be abused in some way, or there’s no story. I like Brin because he’s good at coming up with different drivers for conflict.”

He’s right, and that’s a common weakness of science fiction: Neat Idea Syndrome. My Creative Writing visiting professor, Nancy Zafris, told me when asked that yes, SF did have a pretty low standing within her literary circles.

“Why?” I asked. “There’s so much vibrant, progressive fiction out there.”

“I don’t know,” she said, distastefully. “It just always seems like there’s a problem, so they have to… do something with the computer, and that’s the end.”

Which you know is ridiculous, if you’ve ever read SF, but it does make a point: Neat Idea SF exists, and it’s perceived by the casual reader as a) all the same and b) boring. The casual reader is pretty much right, when the story doesn’t involve you with a character. When it gets down to it, a Neat Idea may catch your fancy, but eventually humans are only interested in reading about themselves.

So yeah, now I want to read David Brin, because what Leonard says makes him sound like exactly the right kind of character-focused writer. Unfortunately, my current bedside reading pile is staggering. I went to the library again tonight, with my newly repaired bike tires, and picked up yet more of my reserved books (Frank Miller, Diana Wynne Jones, Rob Thomas). I’m going to have to get a new box when I move on Friday just to keep my library stuff in. Is there a twelve-step program for this kind of thing?

July 25, 2003 /

Today’s Doonesbury, even though it’s the “Summer Daydream,” implies that Mike is interested in someone other than Kim. The original (1998?) Mike-and-Kim story, including both major arcs, is collectively my favorite Doonesburies ever. If Mike is tired of Kim, Mike needs to die.

Speaking of great comic storylines, Checkerboard Nightmare just wrapped up (I presume) probably my favorite continuous run of strips in its history; Wednesday’s edition packs more great lines into four panels than the fire marshal really allows. I talk about Checkerboard Nightmare a lot, and I still don’t talk about it enough. I was going through the archives a while back and noticed that Mr. Straub produced these three strips all within one week. Those are some of the most perfect one-shots ever committed to pixel. I can’t stand it!

July 14, 2003 /

The LeonardR writes:

“I made a doob-doob (http://www.crummy.com/2002/09/03/1) rendition of Xorph. I’d give you a picture, but I have no way of getting it to you.”

First, that makes me feel bad, since I haven’t updated Xorph in a long, long time. Well, no, first it makes me feel all tingly and flushed, as happens every time someone cool talks about my comic. Second it makes me feel bad. Third: Leonard has made fan art for Xorph; the fan art is made of paper; I have never seen this fan art; I have also never seen most things made of paper. The question this poses, obviously, is are all paper things I haven’t seen actually Xorph fan art?, but I kind of like it better unanswered.

July 11, 2003 /

So the design isn’t quite done yet, but here it is: NFD now bruises its news with some of the neatest software I’ve ever had the chance to yell at. The archive navigation is a lot different now, but one thing I’m actually pretty proud of is that all the old permalinks will still work–if I’ve done it right, there’s a little script that will redirect you right to the newly bruised entry.

I actually started working on this over a week ago, and once I’d started using NB to post I couldn’t go back (which is why there hasn’t been anything on the old NFD page for so long). Switching my journal software was like walking into a dealership with a wheelbarrow and driving out with a red Ferrari, so I’ve been writing, but in here instead. You can read like two weeks of the stuff starting on June 27 (although I think this next one is my favorite yet).

The front-page design has been trickier, since I wanted to finally have something on this site that was valid XHTML and built entirely with CSS. I think it’s pretty close now, but the design still looks better in IE than Netscape. I also tried to tidy all the old code in the conversion, but I’m sure I missed something; if you find broken links or funny-looking entries, let me know.

So enjoy the calendar, the searchability, the randomnymity and the category madness; pretty soon there should be something else up top, either a random quote or a Today in History feature. Expect entries to be rather more frequent but correspondingly shorter, as now updating isn’t such an ordeal that I feel I have to save up my material. Expect also at least two more of the secret projects I’ll be developing this summer, involving obsessions and imperatives.

I really do hope you like the new NFD (BC). And I’d love to stay and type more, but today is Blood Drive Day and I’ve gotta go faint.

November 13, 2002 /

Reasons for wanting to hit Harlan Ellison

Old: Writing things with titles like “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” and “Objects of Desire in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.”

New: Just being a jerk.

October 18, 2002 /

The heat appears to operate entirely independent of my control, turning itself on sometime around 10 am and turning itself off around 10 pm. The knobs on some of the radiators don’t turn at all,and the ones that do turn have no effect. I wasn’t under the impression that this was how radiators worked! Evening is interesting, at least, as I have to open windows around 6 and turn the space heater on again by 11.

Things that have distracted me lately:

Del McCoury wins Bluegrass Award! McCoury Band Wins Entertainment Bluegrass! Bluegrass McCoury Wins Entertainment!

And that’s the news from Kentucky.

if I had a penny for my thoughts
I’d be a millionaire

September 24, 2002 /

Whoops. I put together the entry just before this, about an hour ago, thinking that I didn’t have much besides internet stuff to talk about. I completely forgot that yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my very first online journal entry.

That does make it by far the longest-running journal of any kind I’ve had, but then the next longest was about four months, so it’s been that for a while. And of course I can’t say it was the first NFD entry, because it wasn’t NFD then, just the journal I put together for kicks and hid behind my webcam pic. The interface was pretty awful, but then I was modeling it almost exactly on Emma’s. Also, I was young.

Anyway, yeah, wow, a year. One hundred forty-six entries, for just over four tenths of an entry per day. Since I was trying for one every other day, that’s not too bad.

I’ve fallen down a few times recently, but at least now it’s for different reasons. Maybe running is the art of not slowing down, and walking is the art of just getting up. I haven’t kept anything going this long before, and I’m still going now, and there’s something to be said for that.

Here’s to a year.