Further Assimilations

• 12:00 Is Londo's line "pecked to death by cats" or "nibbled to death by cats"? There's been some debate about this. #
• 13:05 Google isn't sure, but Twitter and Facebook say "nibbled." Kind of a shame, I think "pecked to death by cats" is funnier. #
• 13:32 Converting my elfie mail access from POP to IMAP, since these days I read my mail from different clients at different times. Thanks John! #
• 14:22 @SJGames Every time I speak up and say, "Well, I'll admit that I really really like *this* Microsoft product," they cancel it. #
• 14:57 Dear universe: thank you for turning up these items for which I've been searching all these months. Would still prefer the item I need NOW. #
• 17:35 @fuzzface00 You're executing Plan L: "I no longer know what the L I'm doing." #

Sent subspace radio by LoudTwitter

I'm really losing patience with Facebook apps that lie to me in order to get themselves installed in my profile. I may never install another unless a user I know messages me directly to tell me how awesome an app is.

I'm refurbishing an iMac 400 DV to give to Jesse Braxton. It's just gathering dust, and is only worth about $100 now; all she wants is an e-mail, web browsing, and music playing machine, so this ought to fit the bill nicely. The good news is that it will happily run OS X 10.4 Tiger; the bad news is that I cannibalized the memory and HD some time ago for other work, and Best Buy doesn't seem to sell the necessary bits for nine-year-old Macs. The smallest Ultra ATA drive available at Best Buy is 160 gigabytes, which is large enough to throw the poor iMac disk controller into fits. I've secured a gig of memory, but I'll need to dig a bit for an HD smaller than 128 GB.

Despite my hopes, yesterday was a big chore day, and today is looking similar. I really want to make time to sit down at that sewing machine, though; this is potentially an extremely useful skill that I've been putting off for decades. Assuming I have the chops to do it, I wish to wait no longer.

Cleaned out my wallet last night, adding business card contact info to my computer and phone, throwing away receipts, ditching a gas card I'd used up, etc. Somehow, I have four filled-out Hot Topic frequent buyer cards in my wallet. How a 40-year-old guy ended up with those, I don't know, but it looks like I'll have to head there sometime in the next weeks and find a t-shirt or something to use them on!

Thinking about something twistdfateangel posted:

There are a lot of people out there who can't have a good time unless someone else is having a bad one. In online gaming, we call them "griefers".

Unfortunately, the costuming field in fandom has a fair proportion of them. They used to make me angry... now I just pity them. (And mock them a bit.) I'll wear what I damn well want to wear to the con, and if it's not quite period, or if the fabric color's a little off, or if I've taken parts of the outfit from entirely different fictions: screw it. I'm having fun. Too bad, so sad that they're not.

My coworker Lee B. was joking about heading to PiChiTa for lunch - the local Pizza Hut / KFC / Taco Bell combo. I responded that he'd best be careful, because if he said "pichita" too loudly over there, it would end up as their newest menu item.

Then I got to thinking. Take some lightly seasoned diced chicken. Put it in a taco shell, cover with a little pizza sauce, add a judicious amount of your favorite topping (crumbled sausage, chopped pepperoni or shrooms, whatever), and melt some mozzarella atop the whole thing.

Frankly, that sounds pretty good. If Starr's brave this weekend, we may have to experiment a bit. If it's good, I'll give Lee full credit.

Having already closed a couple of tickets this morning, I bounced over to my RSS feed reader, which notified me of the day's posts on dailycostume.com.

Clicking through the links, I brought up this particular group of variant Sailor Senshi. I thought, "Okay, cute, bet I'm missing someone's fanfic story here..." and then I suddently realized exactly what the theme in question was meant to be.

All I can say is, there's a weekday afternoon cartoon that I'd put on the DVR recording list.

I'm curiously drawn to re-interpretations in modern fiction of the underpinnings of Christian theology, such as the one in the beginning of Tolkien's Silmarillion. Since I've enjoyed Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos novels, I picked up To Reign In Hell at a con or bookstore, and gave it a read.

Well, I tried to. Twice. The first couple of times, for some reason I couldn't get a sense of the characters or the premise. Last night, I took a deep breath, and tried a third time with much more focused attention, getting much farther into it. The attempt didn't work out...

( Spoiler-laden discussion )

I still say the Taltos novels are pretty good, and maybe I'll pick up the next one in line, soon, as a palate cleanser. And the first sentence of this post sure is pleased with itself.

Cindy's in Roanoke Memorial, room 906 West, phone (540) 266-5424. She has Internet access as well (no, not including WoW).

They tried to give her a steroid injection to improve the situation a bit, which she describes as "the most painful thing I have ever encountered. I've been fighting in the SCA for 20 years and have never taken blows that hurt that hard as that shot."

They are going to see if the injection helps, but surgery is still an option. At last report, she didn't have full sensation in either leg.

More as I know it.

Could a techno-magical item in an online computer game be a sign of personal growth in real life?

At level 70 in WoW, players unlock the ability to ride flying critters (for a substantial training sum of 800 gold pieces). At this point, a player will usually spend an extra hundred gold to buy a flying mount, but engineer characters may build their own. (Unless one's second profession is mining, one's going to spend much more than a hundred gold on the necessary materials.)

There's a single part to the flying machine that my miner/engineer didn't know how to make on her own, and it's only taught by one NPC - who would teach her the blueprint if she achieved "Revered" diplomatic status with his organization of dimension-hopping smugglers. The good news is that she could gain 250 reputation points every time she turned in 10 certain emblems that certain slain enemies would drop 33%-50% of the time. The bad news? She needed about 18,000 reputation points to reach Revered.

The good news is that in the process, my engineer looted enough gold to pay for the flying training. In fact, about 14,000 points in, she had enough to just go and buy the griffon flying mount. But, despite temptation, I didn't do so. Enough of the enemy characters had died to populate a small village by this point, and the whole thing had become fairly tedious, but I'd started this job, and something inside me wouldn't take the easy route. I dug in my heels, and little Mirandala collected another 160 emblems.

Now, Mir has her Gnomish Flying Machine (a magical steampunk rattletrap in which the engine misses a few cycles every five minutes or so). And, funnily enough, I'm proud of myself. Sure, it was only a game; but I find it easy to fall into the trap of procrastinating about things, taking shortcuts where offered, or being distracted by shiny things that catch my attention. Here, I chose a task and stuck to it, and now I have something different than the griffon buyers do. Not too shabby.

(Yes, I did much other cool stuff this weekend, including a good party and some general housecleaning. It really is still just a game.)

There's a "25 Things About Me" meme going around Facebook. Rather than just re-post it here, I was inspired by John Scalzi's column to write "20 Memories of Sci-Fi Movies of My Youth". Agreed, it's not quite a catchy a title, but I can live with that.

1) The first SF movie I saw in the theaters was "Star Wars", when I was seven. I remember seeing the commercials and thinking, "Meh, might be okay." Yeah, underestimated that one a bit. I do not remember "Episode 4" atop the opening crawl. The John Williams soundtrack spent long hours in the following months accompanying my pretending to blast TIE fighters from a laser gun turret.

2) The next one I recall seeing in the theaters was "Starcrash". This would only have been a good movie had I been old enough to enjoy Caroline Munro's outfit. I can't remember too much about it now, which may be a good thing, but I'm tempted to find a copy and enjoy the badness from a whole new perspective.

3) "Close Encounters" confused and frightened me, especially the part where Richard Dreyfuss starts losing his sanity. I didn't understand the ending at that age, either. In fact, to this day, there's a lot of unexplained bits having to do with the aliens, which is just as well; I suspect that any explanation from Spielberg would have been far lamer than the mystery.

4) While we're on such movies, I was mildly traumatized by the laser surgery and 'cannibal' robot in "Logan's Run", and I didn't understand the whole "Carousel" thing at all. That's another movie which is probably unwise to watch before puberty, especially in a midnight showing in a darkened house.

5) "Star Trek: The Motion Picture": Wow, new Klingon ships. Whoa whoa, new Klingons! Triple whoa: I am in love with the new Enterprise model! Okay, excellent, what's going to happen for the next ninety minutes? Oh. Not much. I'm glad I never took it in to my head to get myself one of that movie's uniforms.

( Fifteen more behind the cut )

So, that's a snapshot of my first 20 years of SF movie watching, and I am already remembering a bunch I left out. Maybe I'll hit this meme again if I remember anything interesting about the next bunch.

I had plans for last night. Not especially ambitious ones, but I knew how I wanted to spend the evening. Unfortunately, it turns out that Starr's computer picked up a couple of viruses from somewhere, causing WoW to crash on launch as well as blocking most malware removal sites and large swaths of microsoft.com. I spent about three hours fighting them, getting one virus off the machine and restoring her WoW function, but the "Backdoor" trojan is resisting all attempts to remove it. Grrr.

Slept pretty good last night, but traffic was heck this morning. We had a little light rain, which apparently caused everyone to panic, so I got in a little late. I have no desire to be grumpy all day, though, so I'm looking for some music to cheer me up a bit.

Along those lines, I enjoyed MarsCon's Friday night performance by The Cassettes, so I picked up their latest album - on cassette, of course - which included a card for free digital download. No DRM, either. It's pretty good stuff, and any band that includes a home-made theremin is worth some attention.

I just needed to look up a high voltage traveling arc for another reference. For some reason, this in itself has cheered me up a bit.