fine whine

Spurred on by a lack of work I consider important and noticing a button labeled "GeoURL" on Carina's blog, I decided that it was time for me to add a shiny new button to the bottom left side of this site. I added my blog to GeoURL and made my own 80x15 GeoURL button with a tiny little picture of the Mercator projection. So it's the only one like it on the entire internet, at least until somebody swipes it. Go ahead, if you want it, but at least say thanks.

And Carina's only three miles from me, but closer than her are some twenty or thirty DeviantARTists and a whole bunch of other people. Not to say that I'll go out and meet them or anything, but it's nice to know that there are other people around who also put a tiny image and a link on a web page.

Blah blah Christmas and whatnot. I didn't post anything the last two days and I'll let you come up with your own reasons. Speculate away.

Anyway, for almost the last week I've been trying to write about John Varley's Red thunder. It's a great book and it pays homage to a great many things, not just the Heinleinian juvenile books but also south Florida crime fiction. More than that, though, the book (I think) played with the reader. In the beginning there was a passage where the narrator says, "I used the tip of the screen's stylus to touch 7, then 5, then ENTER on the tiny flatscreen keypad..." and then later at least five more (though shorter) descriptions. At first they annoyed me, but then I reasoned that they too must be part of some homage or other. And as the days have passed I've thought more about it and I'd like to think that that little section there is to deliberately annoy readers and weed out the less deserving fans. Or something like that. A day ago, I had it all reasoned out, but the days have passed. Oh well, these things happen.

What else has happened in the intervening time? I got a couple presents including a cheesy but probably fun digital camera and a damn cool watch, the very one after which I've been lusting since first seeing it on TokyoFlash. Today I went and spent a couple giftcards, also a present, on a very reasonably priced Soul Calibur II, which would be more fun if my thumbs weren't sore from a day or two of Gran Turismo 3, which I've been playing for who knows how long and still am only fifteen percent finished. I also watched Full metal jacket, but I'll go into detail on that another time, I think.

By the way, I didn't post anything because my blogging software was acting up. I don't know if it's because I upgraded (and then down-graded back) or just some odd two day quirk, but it wasn't working. I hope you all enjoyed your days, however you spent them. Happy holidays to all, and to all a good night.

Fool that I am, I stayed up until 2am this morning finishing Red thunder. At 1:15 am I had reached Part 3 and was torn between sleep and getting to the epilogue, and as soon as I heard the upstairs neighbor snoring my decision was made; I was in for the long haul.

And I'm glad that I did it, other than the whole feeling like a zombie thing. I'm not going to make that same mistake tonight, though, so I'll have to put off writing more about the book until another night. I just wasted too much time trying to install phpBB2 (a message forum package that should work fine on my computer, but doesn't) and I need to get to bed before the bastard upstairs starts snoring loudly.

We are again trying to restyle this web page, commonly called a "web log" or a "blog". While we are occasionally cheered by the extension of one's finest language that word has already taken on a dark connotation, satirically defined by Greg Knauss as something nasty that we do not care to repeat, though it does amuse us to read. We like to laugh, and on occasion (though not always when we are in the throes of hilarity) like to touch one's nose. For about the last week, though, doing that on one's right side has been somewhat of a painful nuisance. Nose touching may not be a hobby of one's but when we are ill nose blowing definitely becomes one. Today finally the blemish appeared on the surface and we are delving into much more detail than we would like, which may be why we are using the royal affectation and stilted language. We find it difficult to deride bloggers whilst writing about one's most minute yet disgusting happenings. We are not amused.

So yesterday I'd said I'd write more today.

I lied.

So I posted nothing yesterday; I hope that nobody has died from forsaking food and drink to continually refresh my page over and over again in fervent anticipation of further blathering nonsense. I have been busy, but that is no excuse, really. This is my blog, though, and I make the rules—I can post whenever I want. So there.

Anyway I have been doing a whole bunch of stereotypically nerdy things, at least the way I see nerds. Yesterday night I was up late, much later than my bedtime, banging out a new layout for this blog including the now cliched left top corner piece of stock photography. I mean that not as a criticism but as an observation, as I am doing mine to be cool and not kitschy or post-hip. Alas, in doing so I am hitting the wall of every burgeoning web designer, that of browser incompatibility. I developed the somewhat difficult (though simple looking) layout using Safari on the Mac, and as soon as I was happy enough with it I tried loading the same in Internet Explorer, which was a spectacular failure. Nothing lined up and the image, that for which this whole exercise had begun, was nowhere to be found. I was crushed. Expecting no better I loaded it up in Opera, which, true to form for being a sleek and efficient browser, crashed and burned before even trying to show the page. Par for the course. It loaded okay but not as perfectly in the browsers on my PC, but I'm not happy having it look bad on a bunch of systems. That said I could likely poll all three of my readers and find out what they're using and hack my CSS accordingly. So that was that.

Yesterday I also finished Michel Houellebecq's Platform (well, the excellent English translation thereof) but that it not in line with the rest of this entry so I will have to talk about that brilliant, yet disturbing book some other time. Go read it, though, it's very literary. Today I began a book based on an offhand recommendation from a website (well, boingboing) so that's pretty geeky, right? It's Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and it's really pretty interesting so far, my bias against women science fiction authors notwithstanding.

I mean no offense by it, but it seems that men write better science fiction as far as I have read. I know that there are good science fiction authors that happen to be women out there, but I haven't stumbled on them yet. I have of course run through many a bad male author, so really the problem is of bad SF in general and not gender at all. So it is with pleasant surprise that I am enjoying this book.

I am not enjoying having had another flat tire, but that too is outside the realm of this narrative and I will only talk about it once it all has been resolved. So stay tuned... but do make sure that you are properly stocked with food and water, please.

My geekiness continues with today's playing of an hour or so's worth of collectible card games and then three solid hours at the local Gameworks, which is something like Chuck-E-Cheese's for adults but they kept skee-ball. Jessica was stuck to the skee-ball and other ticket-producing machines for the whole time, but I was making the best of my company's holiday hospitality by playing all of the otherwise expensive arcade games. Generally I can only play things that involve shooting or driving, and they had numerous options for both. They had every iteration of both the Time crisis and House of the dead series so I got in a lot of shooting. I even was able to monopolize both sides of Time Crisis 2 and House of the dead once or twice so I could live out my double pistol John Woo dreams. To play both sides of TC2, including the ducking with the pedals, is truly an experience to, er, experience. Especially when somebody else is picking up the credits. Beating them brought the same satisfaction and relief I had remembered. I fared a little worse on the driving games, but my heart wasn't in them after losing a four-lap Indianapolis "500" on the last leg of the last lap. Before the party was over I also got to do several minutes of a rollercoaster simulator which was really cool but the picture was blurry, though that didn't detract from the thrill. What did, somewhat, detract was the ride's inclusion of fake "danger" elements, like a swinging blade and other pointy things just outside of where safety ends. Those didn't really add anything for me, but hey, it was free. The last game I played was called something along the lines of "vertical reality" and though it too had focus troubles it was very fun. The game is played on lifting chairs that rise and fall up to some ten or twenty feet (oh, the wonders of pneumatics!) and the premise was something about popping hot air balloons. I had never played it but nevertheless triumphed over the two small girls and one guy who played with me. I beat him by the total of the other two combined, I think, and had a blast once I got the hang of the game. That one I might pay to play, sometime. And the whole time Gauntlet legends: dark legacy sat in the corner, unplayed. Sadly, I too did not play it but really should have, as I have long enjoyed pumping quarters endlessly into the Gauntlet games in all their incarnations.

That's really not that geeky, in toto, just CCGing, going to the arcade and playing with HTML. Round that out with a bunch of Dynasty warriors 3 on the PS2 and Grand theft auto: Vice city on the PC and what do you have? Me and my long winded account of why I haven't blathered on about anything else the last couple days.

Oh, and I've been correcting my spelling a lot more lately. Between this and the book it has been atrocious lately, so bear with me if that bothers you. I will not stoop to spellchecking these entries, though I know at least one MT plugin supports that.