“flawlessness is not the goal. a compulsive habit of creation matched with an editorial mindset is a far more viable goal.”
Category: Metablogging
Okay, let’s be men for a minute. 101 words isn’t much of a challenge anymore. I’ve been cramming stuff into that space for almost two and a half years and, like a man who plays Tetris every day, I pretty much know what is going to fit where.
I don’t want to change that constraint on Anacrusis because, while challenge is an important part of a constraint, it’s not the only part. It’s an easy selling point; it’s a convenient finish line on days when I’ve got very little material. Besides, I like the form and I’m not done playing with it. But the fact remains that as a device, the word limit has lost much of its ability to stir up ideas.
So. Something new, with occasional interruptions, starting today.
Rita and the Cold Man Timeline
Because I promised Will I would. Keep in mind that this is only my personal ordering! If you find another way to arrange these that makes sense to you, that’s equally valid, and probably better.
- Part 1
- The boy who will be the Cold Man sees people he shouldn’t.
- The man who will be the Cold Man is imprisoned and tortured for information. He negotiates his temporary release.
- He presumably goes to the Numismata, becomes the Cold Man, and returns to his captors with five of his new friends.
- According to one of the Numismata, the Cold Man leaves their order at some point hereabouts.
- Part 2
- Rita joins an elite squad of operatives composed of Tina, Sandra and Mary, directed by Lou.
- On a mission, Rita meets the Cold Man and discovers a little of what he can do.
- Rita and her squad go on a different mission, in Chile. At some point, they become separated, and she meets the Cold Man again. Together they hide in a foxhole and end up in a cave. They discover that Rita can see the Cold Man, just as the Cold Man could once see the Numismata.
- The Cold Man finds that someone’s learning to counter his abilities.
- He meets with an Ad Hoc, who extracts a work agreement with threats against Rita.
- Something goes horribly wrong for him, and Rita dreams about it.
- The next day she receives a pointless surveillance tape. She investigates, solo, and an Ad Hoc warns her off. She investigates further and discovers the Numismata.
- Rita undergoes the Numismatic ritual, giving up warmth and color vision–and maybe more–in exchange for power. She wonders if it’s worth the Cold Man’s life; what she intends to do with that life is ambiguous.
- Rita returns to her HQ, which promptly blows up. She avoids death with her newfound abilities.
- Rita takes on the Ad Hocs.
- Rita kills the Cold Man.
No, Slatt and the one with the Great Zaganza don’t appear in here. Yet!
Site news that nobody cares about
Xorph.com served six hundred-odd pages to the Universitat Politècnica De Catalunya yesterday, which presumably means somebody in their CS department told a bot to crawl me–I’ve never seen them in my referral logs before. Anyone else get similar hits?
Also, Dreamhost now has a thing where they up your bandwidth and disk space quotas every week. It’s not much in terms of disk space–like 20Mb a week–but the bandwidth grows by a gig a week (both for the cheapest plan). Dreamhost is pretty great.
The Good Girls postmortem
Hmm.
I can do better.
Starting today, I use OpenOffice Writer’s word counter for Anacrusis instead of MS Word’s.
Tah dah!
I need PHP to go up one level of a directory, then go back down several more, to include a file. I don’t know how to do this, but I’ve been getting around it by using a URL instead of a path; now Dreamhost is turning off the option of using URLs in include statements, for (good) security reasons, so I can’t do that anymore.
I also absolutely can’t find a way to do it the path way. It won’t work with an absolute path from the root directory, nor from the highest web-accessible directory (I’m in a Linux / Apache environment, if you hadn’t guessed). I can’t use ..s to ratchet up, or do any other kind of relative movement I can think of. Does anyone know how to get what I want?
Actually, Lisa, I think you’re the only PHP programmer who reads this, so maybe I should have just emailed you. But I might be wrong.
Update 0224 hrs: Never mind. I found out how to do it, but it doesn’t help, since I need to have Apache parse the file (a NewsBruiser portal CGI, if you hadn’t guessed) before I grab it, and an internal include obviously doesn’t do that. I’ll have to use the curl library, once I figure out what it is.
And I know I’m a bad programmer for going with this setup in the first place, but I had the choice of frames, meta refreshes or dumping a load on PHP, and it was rocks and frying pans all over.