Saturday, December 29, 2001
 
Hello from England
Blogging in - as a demo - from SE England. Where it is hailing.


Sunday, December 23, 2001
 

Thing 1 (click to view)

Not sure what it is is, but it's an artifact of messing with Freehand's animation feature that
I thought was sort of cute and purple.



Monday, December 17, 2001
 
Brain the size of a planet and ...
I am having a Marvin moment. Y'know, Marvin the Paranoid Android (although actually, I think he fit more the criteria for major depression) when he used to complain about "brain the size of a planet and ... " when the crew assigned him various tasks, such as figuring out Arthur Dent's tea fetish. Anyway, here I sit and I am formatting tables. I do not know how many times I have reformatted this particular set of tables, adding columns, footnotes, new tables, taking out tables and could you renumber them, Alison. At least no one has said anything about fonts, indents and other seriously trivial matters.

I like that. Seriously trivial.





Sunday, December 16, 2001
 
Lost weekend
To writing at least, pretty much, except for a few pages in a sombre fantasy novel I have been ruminating over. I shredded paper, lots of paper. I wrote bills. I found things in the paper clearout that should have been sent out, so I addressed envelopes and stuck stamps on them. I did laundry. I washed dishes. I even vacuumed. Someone had a lousy loud party Saturday night, so I got to sleep in earplugs. First time since leaving Ottawa. I did backups - verily, I have done backups. I am no longer flirting with disaster. I went Christmas shopping. Current score: bought: 1, unbought: 5. I looked in my disc storage box for the computer discs for my major graphics programs. I did not find them. I concluded I'd tossed them with the boxes and all the paper bunff before my last move. I stomped around the house muttering "I'd hang myself if only I could only find the damned rope." Then it occurred to me to look in the audio CD box. I'd still hang myself if I could find the rope - but the day I can lay hands on the rope will be the day I achieve organizational nirvana and no longer need to do so!


 
Foreign object

Just look what popped up in Victoria harbour this weekend. I tramped into town in yet another December deluge (currently we have a heavy rain warning and a wind warning) to do some Christmas shopping (see below), sans camera (because it was so disgusting I couldn't imagine wanting to shoot anything), and there was a Russian submarine moored at the wharf. This picture was taken in the torrential rain and fading light after I'd done the shopping, gone home and got the camera. When I got back, my pants were completely waterlogged. I hope nobody told those poor submariners that Victoria was known for its balmy climate. They might as well have stayed submerged; it'd probably be drier.


 
Call of the Wild
I know you had your doubts about my ability to choose baby presents but go ahead, tell me he's not cuddly and loveable!

I wouldn't dare. :-)




Thursday, December 13, 2001
 
Amel in Silhouette
Did this with Snaggit of all things! It has some nifty 'filter as you capture' features. The base image was a detail from the Throne Price cover.


Wednesday, December 12, 2001
 
The undomesticated female
Revealed I was a drop out from Woman 101 again last night. Went out running with two workmates (great fun and plan to do again), but along the way the other two got to discussing past christmas presents. One said that her mother had given her some [Name]* knives. I'd never heard of that kind of knife, and I was envisioning carving, linocutting and throwing knives, or some martial art. It took a good few yards - panting along, with energetic Border Collie keeping the pace - for it to be established that these were a particular, and reasonably famous, make of kitchen knives. Never occurred to me that kitchen knives might be known by their makes. Thought any adjective attached would donate function.
*Can't recall name.

Then there are the days when one feels one has failed Human 101, and it really is time the landing party came back and retrieved one, because you don't know how much longer you are going to be able to be convincing.





 
Sometimes one flirts with disaster ...
... and sometimes it's a full-blown torrid affair. I fear my backup habits have reached the full blown-torrid affair stage. I am so unsystematic - usually because I tend to write until I'm brain-fried, my eyes are blurring and I recognize the probability (P > 0.05) of my overwriting the new version with the old. So I put off backing up, and the next time I sit down at my computer, with maybe a vague notion I'm going to back up, I open a file instead. Until I do what I did tonight and make myself Do It and realise that I have about 15 000 words sitting unbacked up, including some that I'm exceedingly fond of. Maybe I should start cooking over a kerosene lamp beside my curtains. Or pearl-diving. Or something.

You mean to get it out of your system by taking some relatively harmless risks, instead? :-)





 
Chaos on Fountain Court
E-mailed the rest to you. Needs a tinker and I've got to check my math. Had an outburst of R&R last night.

"There's no pattern!"
Avatlan was calculating silently, a crease on his young brow.
"I went thousands of rounds," Rovin declared. "There's no
pattern."
"A little trick that simple?" Avatlan broke off, and chuffed a
laugh scornfully. "Thousands are nothing. I keep telling you, you can't do
everything empirically. You have to find general ways of - "
"There's no pattern," Rovin said stubbornly, and grinned. "They're
Vrellish numbers."
"That's ridiculous!" Avatlan exclaimed, and jabbed at Rovin.
Rovin blocked. "It's true! Mona told me about it. When she fixed
my cuts up."


 
Calgary Coven Page
Looked good on my Windows XP machine. Classy. Thanks for the honorary membership! Much appreciated. Is Rebecca's cover the one being used for the ACE distribution in the US? I think I like the Edge cover better but the new one is still very nice. I haven't seen Rebecca's book of short stories. Know where I could order one? Maybe you could get the title from her and put that on the Coven page, too.


 
Prince George Citizen Today
Newspaper clip


This in today's Prince George Citizen, courtesy of Paul Strickland. :-)



Sunday, December 09, 2001
 
Limp cabbage
Came close to giving up on a Sunday's writing this morning as I trudged through a scene with all the suspense of limp cabbage, while characters wandered in and characters wandered out and I, the writer, did a lot of staring at and describing of the tiles. True, they're interesting tiles and highly communicative of my world's history and society, but the POV character didn't have the knowledge to interpret them. It finally dawned on me that I was telling the whole chapter from entirely the wrong point of view: it was the other character who already knew the information I needed to convey and was going to make the choices that at that point were going to advance the plot (ie, cause trouble). I was going to shift into her viewpoint for a second chapter, but now I'm going to rewrite the first from hers as well, and in the meantime I accumulated 3 700 words of a visit to a village in a bottle, which will be the set for a murderous climax, a rather more balanced and charming archnemesis to Creon than I'd originally envisioned, her children, whom I didn't expect, and the answer as to why Creon and company get shot down. Why can't I just send groups of characters in quests off to the ends of the earth without having to have them INTERLOCK so tightly it has me practically doing calculus to figure out who has to know and say what, when. But then when I read groups of characters going in opposite directions I tend to only get interested in one group and start skipping chapters. But then I'm also the kind of readers who will take a peek at the end of a book if I get to like someone and the body count is going higher, or the author is showing signs of a predisposition to doing particularly crushing and nasty things. In short, I cheat.


Friday, December 07, 2001
 
Central suppression
I always thought optical prescriptions were like shoes. They had to be fit JUST RIGHT. That was until my optician fitted my right eye with a contact lens that is at least 1.0 diopters too weak. His rationale being that it would enable me to do close-work. At any given time the brain is taking input preferentially from one eye at a time. Developmentally, this can be a bad thing - children with amblyopia ("lazy eye", often due to having one eye with poorer acuity than the other) will suppress input so consistently that it becomes permanent - the optical cortex served by the poorer eye does not receive the correct stimuli to develop visual processing (same as kittens, reared blindfolded until they're past the age when the optical cortex is susceptible to learning, are effectively blind when their blindfolds are removed). But in the adult, it's the way the brain works, although I gather there's a bias. So the rationale of my having one weak eye and one strong eye is that the left will do the far work and the right do the near work, and with adaptation the central suppression will take care of the switch. I am not convinced. My accommodation is still pretty good, though the lense may be thickening at 15 layers (cell layers?) per annum, and the weaker lens, while fine for reading, is not so fine for using the computer, which I tend to set as far away from me as the geometry of the workstation allows. And when I'm up and walking I feel like I'm looking through a scum. It's worse because I am right-eye dominant, as I discovered in archery. I'm trying to remember - was it the movie Top Gun where the central character almost washed out of ?flight training because his dominance was opposite to the way the instruments were configured, and once his army-brat female friend figured it out, they got up to some hairy antics retaining him? Anyway, an interesting experiment, and I'll give it a little while, but I think I'd rather see well at distance with both eyes.


 
Friday night
And for the second Friday night running I am doing webwork. The fruit of my efforts comes in the form of an update of my woefully neglected Calgary Coven page, and Rebecca's and Marie's pages. Including either fixing or removing links. I also added TP's first review to the Throne Price page on my own site. Have to check the Coven pages on a Windows machine to see how the colours look - I was consciously bleaching things out because, even although my Mac screen has been calibrated, I fear the gamma difference may be doing me in. The joy of cross-platform. The other joy of cross-platform is getting Netscape to center the backgrounds on my menus. Next time I feel like another round with CSS - or am feeling rich enough to contemplate buying the O'Reilly book on the subject, because that's what usually happens when I venture into that particular thicket - I will try to fix it. Again.


Wednesday, December 05, 2001
 
Biggles
This from an e-mail exchange with RFF'er Barry Haworth. I dunno. The name just got me. Biggles.
Far cry from "Bloody Red Barron". Wonder if Captain Johns was a WWI pilot himself?

"Series of books for boys written by English author, Captain W.E. Johns
between the 1930s and the 1960s. Biggles was a pilot in WW1, and the books
detail his adventures in WW1, between the wars, WW2 and after. Mostly
adventure type stories, very popular in England and Australia (& I think in
Canada & New Zealand - though he never got into the US market much).

Johns wrote some SF as well which I also enjoyed, though if was more F than
S."



 
Welcome to Working from Home
Hurrah! New machine at home. Now I can come home and still get web work done of an evening. Kudos to David for setting up.


Monday, December 03, 2001
 
Picture Moment

Mm, found the image this was clipped from on the Centre's digital camera when I downloaded the brain pictures I snapped today. Do you think my student employees may be feeling over worked?


Here's a shot of psychology department's brain. I took it apart and snapped a bunch of other pictures as well, with probably vain notions of making a Flash version over Xmas that names a feature and gives you a "right" response when you click on it.



 
PTSD
I read a bunch of books on long term recovery and set backs to do with trauma back when I was doing crisis line stuff, when researching Amel, and also one on false memories (or parts of it) suggested by my brother-in-law the prosecutor. Things that stuck with me included better recovery prospects for people who could manage to trust others again despite the experience and were outward focused, tendancy of boys/men to be more inclined than women to believe they somehow brought about the abuse - presumably because that gave them some control re: preventing it happening again, tendancy for victims in both cases to wind up in abusive situations again. Recently came across a book called Unspeakable Truths and Happy Endings by Rebecca Coffey which turned out to be too therapy, self-help (for care givers) oriented to hold me to the end, but I was pleased by the resonance struck in her first chapter, "The Helping Hand Strikes Again" with Amel's situation in Throne Price. She asserts that the very people who are supposed to be helping trauma victims tend to blame them, to protect themselves from identifying, or the down play the severity of the experience, again because that's psychologically easier. There's a bit I like a lot in Throne Price where a throne secretary asks Amel if his experiences were "like" those portrayed in the kill show, and when Amel confirms the misrepresentation, the secretary concludes at once with something along the lines of "Oh, so it wasn't so bad then". Amel agrees because that's easiest.


 
neat words

  • Spielraum - "room to play"

  • prosody - emotional tone of voice


Prosody is from my biopsych course. Spielraum is from Chaos.

Mentioned on the phone the urge to do an outake of Lurol getting Amel to judge emotion from voices and faces, sort of as a parlor game - although she'd probably get it on the record. Might even be up front and pushy about "Oh come on, this isn't going to hurt! Be nice! Indulge me." Maybe we could work out high powered video space invaders game between Erien and Horth into it somewhere.



Sunday, December 02, 2001
 
Can't I cancel tomorrow
Please? 3 600 words today on Centaur. I have the trajectory to the end mapped out, know exactly what moves various parties need to make, though not yet the precise triggers and inspirations behind them. Bricklaying needing to be done on the interlocking part of the story - the enemy actions - but the boundary conditions are laid in. It may not work out at 200 000 words after all. I want to crawl inside it for two weeks or so. Until what I have worked out in my head is down in some form or another.


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