kat_feed
Monday, January 31
For an amazingly eventful year, 2010 has produced not a lot of blog posts. Um.
A picture's worth a thousand words?
In the general sense... I'm doing well. I'm just entering the third trimester, meaning I have gone from being comfortable (if mildly dismayed by the disappearance of my toes) to increasingly uncomfortable, short of breath, irritable because no one will let me do anything, more irritable because when I sneakily do the things they aren't letting me it's difficult to impossible, vastly irritated by the new and intriguing pregnancy side effects (blurry vision, are you kidding me?), vaguely disturbed by the commercialized buyfest I am apparently supposed to embark on to prep for a kidlet*, and generally turning into a grumpy, sleepy, pregnant person. Dan bears up to this remarkably well. Actually, he and everyone else seems to think it's pretty funny, which doesn't help with the grumpiness, but there we are.
Pretty much everything else in my life has been eclipsed by the state of Pregnant, which is, I suppose, another reason for the lack of blog posts. If it's not happening to you, it's pretty dull. I suppose I should be enjoying that -- I gather that once the kidlet actually arrives, dull will be something of a novelty -- but eh.
So if anyone's still reading this, there you are. State of the kat. Oh, and pictures.
*I'm not a shopper, and lost interest in the whole thing once I was told it was too early to be buying kidlet books. And yet, I have to shop anyway, if only to determine which of the gigantic masses of stuff the world is trying to sell me are actually necessary. The answer seems to be "not many".
A picture's worth a thousand words?
 |
| Year in Pictures -- 2010 |
In the general sense... I'm doing well. I'm just entering the third trimester, meaning I have gone from being comfortable (if mildly dismayed by the disappearance of my toes) to increasingly uncomfortable, short of breath, irritable because no one will let me do anything, more irritable because when I sneakily do the things they aren't letting me it's difficult to impossible, vastly irritated by the new and intriguing pregnancy side effects (blurry vision, are you kidding me?), vaguely disturbed by the commercialized buyfest I am apparently supposed to embark on to prep for a kidlet*, and generally turning into a grumpy, sleepy, pregnant person. Dan bears up to this remarkably well. Actually, he and everyone else seems to think it's pretty funny, which doesn't help with the grumpiness, but there we are.
Pretty much everything else in my life has been eclipsed by the state of Pregnant, which is, I suppose, another reason for the lack of blog posts. If it's not happening to you, it's pretty dull. I suppose I should be enjoying that -- I gather that once the kidlet actually arrives, dull will be something of a novelty -- but eh.
So if anyone's still reading this, there you are. State of the kat. Oh, and pictures.
*I'm not a shopper, and lost interest in the whole thing once I was told it was too early to be buying kidlet books. And yet, I have to shop anyway, if only to determine which of the gigantic masses of stuff the world is trying to sell me are actually necessary. The answer seems to be "not many".
Thursday, November 04
So after the last doctor's visit... it's official. I'm pregnant again.
Fourteen weeks pregnant, actually. Being not entirely dim and quite capable of counting, I have known that I was pregnant for some time, but chose to treat my pregnancy as unofficial until the end of the first trimester -- partly to minimize the damage if it turned out another disappointment, and partly because being official would have involved announcing it, which would have been effort, and I have frankly been too bloody ill for the past month or two to even think about such a thing. Whoever named it "morning sickness" was a) male and b) in need of a damned good kicking, though in fairness I should say that I haven't actually thrown up at any time. Wanted to throw up, yes. Been absolutely positive I was going to throw up, yes. Seriously considered sticking my fingers down my throat in hopes it would stop with the damned day-in, day-out, morning-noon-and-night queasiness, yes. Actually thrown up, no. I'm one of the lucky ones. Also there's this lovely thing called pregnancy fatigue, which is sort of like having the Sandman stand behind you starting at, oh, ten am or so and constantly thump you in the head with the giant blackjack of Sleep until you give in, which in my case was usually about six pm. Given that I get home from work at around five, it was not leaving a lot of the day to go on.
Don't get me started on the sore boobs.
At any rate, both the sickness and the fatigue have, as promised, started to let up with the second trimester; I have an estimated due date of May 1st; I have ultrasound photos of a perfectly healthy alien tadpole; and my doctor tells me that, having got to the second trimester with said tadpole, I've now got a 99.5% chance of carrying to term. So I'm letting myself be sort of cautiously optimistic about the whole thing and, you know. Tell people.
Consider yourselves told.
Fourteen weeks pregnant, actually. Being not entirely dim and quite capable of counting, I have known that I was pregnant for some time, but chose to treat my pregnancy as unofficial until the end of the first trimester -- partly to minimize the damage if it turned out another disappointment, and partly because being official would have involved announcing it, which would have been effort, and I have frankly been too bloody ill for the past month or two to even think about such a thing. Whoever named it "morning sickness" was a) male and b) in need of a damned good kicking, though in fairness I should say that I haven't actually thrown up at any time. Wanted to throw up, yes. Been absolutely positive I was going to throw up, yes. Seriously considered sticking my fingers down my throat in hopes it would stop with the damned day-in, day-out, morning-noon-and-night queasiness, yes. Actually thrown up, no. I'm one of the lucky ones. Also there's this lovely thing called pregnancy fatigue, which is sort of like having the Sandman stand behind you starting at, oh, ten am or so and constantly thump you in the head with the giant blackjack of Sleep until you give in, which in my case was usually about six pm. Given that I get home from work at around five, it was not leaving a lot of the day to go on.
Don't get me started on the sore boobs.
At any rate, both the sickness and the fatigue have, as promised, started to let up with the second trimester; I have an estimated due date of May 1st; I have ultrasound photos of a perfectly healthy alien tadpole; and my doctor tells me that, having got to the second trimester with said tadpole, I've now got a 99.5% chance of carrying to term. So I'm letting myself be sort of cautiously optimistic about the whole thing and, you know. Tell people.
Consider yourselves told.
Tuesday, January 01
Well, I at least managed to keep track of what books I read this year, even if I didn't review them all. Here's the list, with occasional commentary.
[Read More!]
Monday, July 09
Well, seeing as I was tagged by Pandababy:
1. I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
2. Each participant posts eight random facts about themselves.
3. Tagees should write a blogpost of eight random facts about themselves.
4. At the end of the post, eight more bloggers are tagged (named and shamed).
5. Go to their blog, leave a comment telling them they're tagged (cut and run).
Of course, I've already shared most of the random and useless facts about myself on the blog, because what else are blogs for? But we'll see what we can do.
1) I don't drink soda. At all. Partly this is because soda tends to try and sneak caffeine up on you, and I have a very strong reaction to caffeine (my loved ones have been known to bravely throw themselves on a cup of coffee, just to avoid having me around on a caffeine high.) And partly, well, I just don't like soda. It's all sweet and stuff. I'm not even that keen on most fruit juices -- give me milk any day. Or failing that, water.
2) In a possibly related random fact, I've never had a cavity.
3) I have a somewhat inexplicable weakness for Marx Brothers movies. Seriously. Show me A Night at the Opera or Go West (which I just watched on Friday, in fact: comfort movie) and I will be rolling around on the floor, while my poor ignorant husband, who was not indoctrinated to the wonders of Harpo at a young age, looks on in bewildered horror. I can't entirely blame my upbringing -- after all, the Three Stooges and Tarzan didn't really take -- but I'll get what milage I can out of it.
4) The last time I was in a hospital (for myself) was that time when I was three and told my parents I'd drunk gasoline (I hadn't. I'd put my mouth over the spout and breathed a lot of fumes, but I hadn't actually drunk it. My parents were lectured on how they now had to buy locking gas caps and a padlock for the medicine cabinet and I was going to grow up to be a drug addict, but I haven't been able to stand the smell of gasoline since.) That brought my grand total of hospital visits -- not counting being born in one -- up to two. I've had antibiotics once, for a staph infection when I was thirteen, and I've yet to break a bone, have stitches, or do any other scary hospital-requiring things. Given that I've lived and worked on a farm all my life, that makes me scarily lucky.
5) I own a television, because it is necessary to make the DVD player work and without the DVD player I cannot watch Marx Brothers movies. But I don't have television. No reception in the sticks, donchaknow, and I have this moral objection to paying people to flash advertising in my face. Besides, I have enough distractions in my life.
6) My hand-to-eye coordination is zip. This is a random fact of the week because I'm trying to learn racquetball and it's brought home the hand-eye disconnect in a painful fashion. There's a reason my sport is swimming. I mean, everyone else is getting a kick watching me confidently swing the racquet only to miss the ball by several inches, but it's a tad embarrassing.
This is also why I don't play video games that rely on fast reflexes. It wastes time and makes the pig cry in sheer frustration. As the "twitch" style of video games accounts for, oh, 90% of the market, that's another distraction my nervous system has spared me.
7) I cut my hair to its current length in 2003, because long hair was just too damned impractical. I mean, it was pretty and all, but it tangled at every breath of air and had this tendency to get caught in stuff, so I kept it pulled back most of the time. And me with my hair pulled back was not pretty. It's the nose that did it. I looked like a hatchet being aimed.
So, I cut it back to chin-length. It was the first time my hair had been cut since I was eleven. The unlamented remains measured just over a foot long and got donated to Wigs For Kids.
8) I have a parrot. This isn't so much a random fact as something I hadn't gotten around to telling y'all about yet, since I've only had him about two weeks. He'll get a blog post of his own one of these days.
And now I'm supposed to tag people, but... I'm not keen on the idea of picking and choosing. Also, lazy. Everybody consider yourself tagged.
1. I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
2. Each participant posts eight random facts about themselves.
3. Tagees should write a blogpost of eight random facts about themselves.
4. At the end of the post, eight more bloggers are tagged (named and shamed).
5. Go to their blog, leave a comment telling them they're tagged (cut and run).
Of course, I've already shared most of the random and useless facts about myself on the blog, because what else are blogs for? But we'll see what we can do.
1) I don't drink soda. At all. Partly this is because soda tends to try and sneak caffeine up on you, and I have a very strong reaction to caffeine (my loved ones have been known to bravely throw themselves on a cup of coffee, just to avoid having me around on a caffeine high.) And partly, well, I just don't like soda. It's all sweet and stuff. I'm not even that keen on most fruit juices -- give me milk any day. Or failing that, water.
2) In a possibly related random fact, I've never had a cavity.
3) I have a somewhat inexplicable weakness for Marx Brothers movies. Seriously. Show me A Night at the Opera or Go West (which I just watched on Friday, in fact: comfort movie) and I will be rolling around on the floor, while my poor ignorant husband, who was not indoctrinated to the wonders of Harpo at a young age, looks on in bewildered horror. I can't entirely blame my upbringing -- after all, the Three Stooges and Tarzan didn't really take -- but I'll get what milage I can out of it.
4) The last time I was in a hospital (for myself) was that time when I was three and told my parents I'd drunk gasoline (I hadn't. I'd put my mouth over the spout and breathed a lot of fumes, but I hadn't actually drunk it. My parents were lectured on how they now had to buy locking gas caps and a padlock for the medicine cabinet and I was going to grow up to be a drug addict, but I haven't been able to stand the smell of gasoline since.) That brought my grand total of hospital visits -- not counting being born in one -- up to two. I've had antibiotics once, for a staph infection when I was thirteen, and I've yet to break a bone, have stitches, or do any other scary hospital-requiring things. Given that I've lived and worked on a farm all my life, that makes me scarily lucky.
5) I own a television, because it is necessary to make the DVD player work and without the DVD player I cannot watch Marx Brothers movies. But I don't have television. No reception in the sticks, donchaknow, and I have this moral objection to paying people to flash advertising in my face. Besides, I have enough distractions in my life.
6) My hand-to-eye coordination is zip. This is a random fact of the week because I'm trying to learn racquetball and it's brought home the hand-eye disconnect in a painful fashion. There's a reason my sport is swimming. I mean, everyone else is getting a kick watching me confidently swing the racquet only to miss the ball by several inches, but it's a tad embarrassing.
This is also why I don't play video games that rely on fast reflexes. It wastes time and makes the pig cry in sheer frustration. As the "twitch" style of video games accounts for, oh, 90% of the market, that's another distraction my nervous system has spared me.
7) I cut my hair to its current length in 2003, because long hair was just too damned impractical. I mean, it was pretty and all, but it tangled at every breath of air and had this tendency to get caught in stuff, so I kept it pulled back most of the time. And me with my hair pulled back was not pretty. It's the nose that did it. I looked like a hatchet being aimed.
So, I cut it back to chin-length. It was the first time my hair had been cut since I was eleven. The unlamented remains measured just over a foot long and got donated to Wigs For Kids.
8) I have a parrot. This isn't so much a random fact as something I hadn't gotten around to telling y'all about yet, since I've only had him about two weeks. He'll get a blog post of his own one of these days.
And now I'm supposed to tag people, but... I'm not keen on the idea of picking and choosing. Also, lazy. Everybody consider yourself tagged.
Saturday, June 23
Yes, I know. I haven't been posting. Work took another of its dramatic upwards swings, and on top of that I've had really terrible energy for the past two weeks or so. I'm tired all the time, sleeping insane amounts (when I can sleep in, that is) and generally dragging around being snappy and moody. I also missed a period, which suggested an obvious reason for all this, but the miracles of modern technology assure me it is Not So. Apparently the missed period is a symptom, not a cause.
Whatever. I don't care what's making me tired and whiny, but it can go away ANY TIME NOW.
However, the work crunch seems to be slackening, which means back to writing.
Rewrite Progress
Comments: The good news: only fifty pages left. The bad news: I'm into the really serious flounder, where not only did I not have any idea what I was doing when I wrote this stuff, I have only a hazy idea what I'm doing now. It's the heart of the Dreaded Middle and how I'm getting from where I am to where I need to be... well. Um. Look! A pink elephant!
It's slowly coming clear, though. I just have to keep banging at it.
Changes: Threw out a lot of meaningless dancing around. Revised the Naxan herdsman scene so it's (mostly) in line with what I'm doing now. Figured out how to dump a lot of Clues into the narrative in a reasonably sneaky way.
Whatever. I don't care what's making me tired and whiny, but it can go away ANY TIME NOW.
However, the work crunch seems to be slackening, which means back to writing.
Rewrite Progress
| |
122 / 172 (70.9%) |
Comments: The good news: only fifty pages left. The bad news: I'm into the really serious flounder, where not only did I not have any idea what I was doing when I wrote this stuff, I have only a hazy idea what I'm doing now. It's the heart of the Dreaded Middle and how I'm getting from where I am to where I need to be... well. Um. Look! A pink elephant!
It's slowly coming clear, though. I just have to keep banging at it.
Changes: Threw out a lot of meaningless dancing around. Revised the Naxan herdsman scene so it's (mostly) in line with what I'm doing now. Figured out how to dump a lot of Clues into the narrative in a reasonably sneaky way.
Wednesday, May 30
First, a point of business... a couple of people have asked whether it's better to comment on this blog or on the LJ feed. I see the comments either way (I don't respond to them because I'm a jerk, not because I don't see 'em) but the LJ feed disappears after a month and takes all comments with it into oblivion, so if you have something substantial to say, you may wish to click through and say it here.
On the topic of not answering comments, indigofire was confused over my reference to weaning calves and whifflebats. Ah, yes. Technical terms. In this case "weaning" refers to that time period when we stop giving the babies milk and start encouraging them to eat grass, hay, grain, and other grown-up food, and "whifflebats" are what we use to beat their little heads in when they mob us and try to suck us to death in protest. I'm actually quite proud of the whifflebats, because they were my idea. If you beat them with your bare hands, you hurt your hands, and if you hit them with an actual stick you risk actually hurting the wee buggers instead of making them blink stupidly at you ("my head just went thunk! Why did my head go thunk?") You could not hit them at all, of course, but then at best you end up extremely damp, and at worst you get knocked down and danced on by, um, 96 little razor-sharp hooves. The "babies" weigh 120 pounds each at this stage, and they outnumber us by a factor of many.
Anyway, the whifflebats work pretty well. We still haven't got the Mennonite girl to put her shoulder into it, but the rest of us can whale away guilt-free. The calves are reduced to lurking in the tall grass and bawling loudly at anyone who goes by.
At any rate....
Rewrite Progress
Comments: Of the nine pages revised I only threw out two, so it is seemingly a better day. I'm not fooled, though. I was really going through picking out the good bits to put them in proper order. There's whole reams of crap lurking deep in the manuscript waiting to be waded through and chucked, and now they have their good bits removed.
High Points: Made the antag work for his antagonism. Added actual tension to the Bestiary scene. Gave the Naxan scene a point.
On the topic of not answering comments, indigofire was confused over my reference to weaning calves and whifflebats. Ah, yes. Technical terms. In this case "weaning" refers to that time period when we stop giving the babies milk and start encouraging them to eat grass, hay, grain, and other grown-up food, and "whifflebats" are what we use to beat their little heads in when they mob us and try to suck us to death in protest. I'm actually quite proud of the whifflebats, because they were my idea. If you beat them with your bare hands, you hurt your hands, and if you hit them with an actual stick you risk actually hurting the wee buggers instead of making them blink stupidly at you ("my head just went thunk! Why did my head go thunk?") You could not hit them at all, of course, but then at best you end up extremely damp, and at worst you get knocked down and danced on by, um, 96 little razor-sharp hooves. The "babies" weigh 120 pounds each at this stage, and they outnumber us by a factor of many.
Anyway, the whifflebats work pretty well. We still haven't got the Mennonite girl to put her shoulder into it, but the rest of us can whale away guilt-free. The calves are reduced to lurking in the tall grass and bawling loudly at anyone who goes by.
At any rate....
Rewrite Progress
| |
35 / 172 (20.3%) |
Comments: Of the nine pages revised I only threw out two, so it is seemingly a better day. I'm not fooled, though. I was really going through picking out the good bits to put them in proper order. There's whole reams of crap lurking deep in the manuscript waiting to be waded through and chucked, and now they have their good bits removed.
High Points: Made the antag work for his antagonism. Added actual tension to the Bestiary scene. Gave the Naxan scene a point.
Sunday, February 04
Still poking and prodding at what needs to happen in that 10K of story. It's taking a bit better shape now. And at least part of it involves Elliot being menaced by a woman in a bathtub with a sword. Darn bubbles cover everything....
I am noticing, though, that when I'm in these little writing dips I am much prone to distraction and sudden, fierce enthusiasms. Last time it was aliens, and I spent a happy weekend with GURPS Space plotting a series of alien races for a campaign I'll probably never run. This time, it would have been computer games. Except the universe did not cooperate. So instead it was quilting.
It may be a record for shortest burst of obsessive enthusiasm ever. It began at approximately 7 pm, when I was folding laundry and experienced the following thought process:
"Damn, all these shirts of Dan's have holes in them, but he won't let me throw them out. I guess I should mend them."
"Which isn't a problem, really, because I kinda like sewing. Why don't I sew any more? But what would I make?"
"Hey, there's all these holey t-shirts, and I have that silk think upstairs that ripped too badly to mend, and those slacks that got purple spots of dye in the wash...."
"I COULD MAKE A QUILT!"
... and lasted all the way until about 11 pm, when, after copious internet research, I came to the twin conclusions that, first, it wasn't actually feasible to make a quilt from worn-out t-shirts and a pair of slacks and I was going to have to spend actual money on actual fabric; and second, while I had always liked the sewing, I despised the cutting, and it looked like an awful lot of quilting was going to be cutting things up in itty wee triangles. So I got bored.
It's probably just as well. Dan, who was quite blase about me scattering dice all over the bed and muttering about "racial point balance" under my breath, was unnerved by the quilting craze. I'm not sure which disturbed him more, the picture of me sitting on the couch sewing in a terrifyingly domestic and wifely way, or the idea of me attacking his gianormous t-shirt collection with a pair of scissors and a fanatic gleam. Either way he was most relieved when I gave the idea up.
And now I can't find my scissors anywhere.
Oh, well. At least I got all the laundry put away in the grips of my craze. Back to the actual writing, I suppose. Or I could go surf eBay some more. People pay really stupid money for some stuff on there. I feel this incredible urge to ransack the closets and start selling excess stuff on eBay.
Do you think Dan will mind?
I am noticing, though, that when I'm in these little writing dips I am much prone to distraction and sudden, fierce enthusiasms. Last time it was aliens, and I spent a happy weekend with GURPS Space plotting a series of alien races for a campaign I'll probably never run. This time, it would have been computer games. Except the universe did not cooperate. So instead it was quilting.
It may be a record for shortest burst of obsessive enthusiasm ever. It began at approximately 7 pm, when I was folding laundry and experienced the following thought process:
"Damn, all these shirts of Dan's have holes in them, but he won't let me throw them out. I guess I should mend them."
"Which isn't a problem, really, because I kinda like sewing. Why don't I sew any more? But what would I make?"
"Hey, there's all these holey t-shirts, and I have that silk think upstairs that ripped too badly to mend, and those slacks that got purple spots of dye in the wash...."
"I COULD MAKE A QUILT!"
... and lasted all the way until about 11 pm, when, after copious internet research, I came to the twin conclusions that, first, it wasn't actually feasible to make a quilt from worn-out t-shirts and a pair of slacks and I was going to have to spend actual money on actual fabric; and second, while I had always liked the sewing, I despised the cutting, and it looked like an awful lot of quilting was going to be cutting things up in itty wee triangles. So I got bored.
It's probably just as well. Dan, who was quite blase about me scattering dice all over the bed and muttering about "racial point balance" under my breath, was unnerved by the quilting craze. I'm not sure which disturbed him more, the picture of me sitting on the couch sewing in a terrifyingly domestic and wifely way, or the idea of me attacking his gianormous t-shirt collection with a pair of scissors and a fanatic gleam. Either way he was most relieved when I gave the idea up.
And now I can't find my scissors anywhere.
Oh, well. At least I got all the laundry put away in the grips of my craze. Back to the actual writing, I suppose. Or I could go surf eBay some more. People pay really stupid money for some stuff on there. I feel this incredible urge to ransack the closets and start selling excess stuff on eBay.
Do you think Dan will mind?
Tuesday, November 28
elmeraldus-neo asks:
If you see this, please help her out with the study by posting this on your blog. The full directions are here.
(Ganked from mizkit).
What is the speed of meme? People write in general (typically truimphant) terms about how swiftly a single voice can travel from one side of the internet to the other and back again, but how often does that actually happen? Of those instances, how often is it organic?
Most memes, I'd wager, are only superficially organic: beginning small, they acquire minor prominence among low-traffic blogs before being picked up by a high-traffic one, from which many more low-traffic blogs snatch them. Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping, I believe most memes are—to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett's rebuttal of punctuated equilibrium—"skyhooked" into prominence by high-traffic blogs.
For my talk at the MLA, I'd prefer being able to quantify this triumphalism with hard numbers....
If you see this, please help her out with the study by posting this on your blog. The full directions are here.
(Ganked from mizkit).
Saturday, October 21
Bored. Procrastinating. Haven't posted in ages.
Um... meme?
1. Explain what ended your last relationship. He wanted no-commitment sex, I hadn't yet learned that I fall in love with anyone I sleep with, things ended predictably badly. At least I finally had the sense to end it myself. Learned later that he'd been cheating on me, but really, that was just salt to the wound at that point.
2. When was the last time you shaved? ...last year sometime? I dunno. Occasionally I get a fit of bad self-image and shave my pits, but really, me and razors? Not a good combo. And I'm frankly too lazy for the sustained effort shaving requires.
3. What were you doing this morning at 8 a.m.? Making like a log. Until the alarm went off, anyway. Curse you, foul contraption!
4. Were you any good at math? Eh. Not terrible, not great. No retention of skills whatsoever; I doubt I'd recognize a calculus equation these days if it bit me in the butt, although anything biting me in the butt is, on reflection, unlikely to be a calculus equation.
5. What were you doing 15 minutes ago? Either catching up on Battlestar Galactica (note to self: order anti-depressants), putting food in the oven, or playing Nexus Wars. I dunno. Clocks are foul contraptions too.
Food in the oven! ARGH!
6. Your prom night? ... Oh yay. Not burned.
Prom night? I was homeschooled, but I've heard of those. Some kind of torture session, right?
7. Do you have any famous ancestors? My aunt once paid someone to say we were related to some guy named Lafayette -- no, not that Lafayette, some other one who did something or the other during the War of 1812. Supposedly my last name is a corruption of his, which is actually the only likely bit about the whole story. It made my aunt happy, though. She's that kind of person.
8. Have you had to take a loan out for school? No. My extended family has money in an unassuming kind of way; they put me through college. Which was damned nice, I must say, and freed me from the silly obligation to "get a good job" using the magic piece o'paper and allowing me to use my years in college for the unique purpose of learning.
Not that I have Opinions on the educational system er anything.
9. Do you know the words to the song on your myspace profile? I will get a myspace profile when -- eh, actually? Even mild torture would do it. But voluntarily? Not so much.
10. Last thing received in the mail? A catalog from Heifer International. Go Heifer International! If I had money I might even give you some!
11. How many different beverages have you had today? Just water. The evil milk truck driver came and sucked away all my milk before I got to work. Curse the name of the milk truck driver! (Actually, I can't remember the name of the milk truck driver, so even if I was good at cursing he'd be safe.)
12. Do you ever leave messages on people's answering machine? Sure. In many cases I view this as superior to speaking to the actual person. See: Evil Contraptions.
13. Who did you lose your CONCERT virginity to? Jimmy Buffett. Yes, really. If you don't count the dozens of music festivals I attended from toddler age onward.
14. Do you draw your name in the sand when you go to the beach? No. I prefer making Easter Island faces. Or, better yet, playing the Wave Chasing game. But I haven't been to the beach very often, and about half the ones I have been to had no sand.
15. What's the most painful dental procedure you've had? Beats me. I haven't been to a dentist since I was six, because they wouldn't stop threatening my mother about how Dire Things would happen if I didn't get braces. So far the only Dire Thing has been an occasional cut on my inner lip from the jutting tooth. Frankly, if the choice is between two years of pain, sub-brace cavities, mouth sores, and no apples, and the occasional self-inflicted cut, I'm all about the bleeding.
16. What is out your back door? Porch, grill, backyard, and a bunch of very insolent deer.
17. Any plans for Friday night? Since I work most Saturdays, nope.
18. Do you like what the ocean does to your hair? I've only been swimming a few times in the ocean, and always with scuba gear. For the record, I don't like what scuba gear does to my hair (mostly, get caught in it).
19. Have you ever received one of those big tins of 3 different popcorns? It's possible a clueless relative gave us one once, but I doubt it.
20. Have you ever been to a planetarium? Not since I was ten.
21. Do you re-use towels after you shower? Is this some kind of trick question? Does anyone who does their own laundry actually use a new towel for every shower?
22. Some things you are excited about? World Fantasy, successful playing with PHP (more on this later), having a day off tomorrow, potentially getting time enough to write soon.
23. What is your favorite flavor of JELLO? The kind with fruit in is okay. Not really a Jell-O person.
24. Describe your keychain(s)? It used to be a great big green thing so I couldn't loose my keys. But I lost it. So now it's Dan's nifty flashlight-onna-keychain and one of those thingies that opens your car before you get there, in theory. This one is I think possessed by the Devil.
25. Where do you keep your change? In theory, in my wallet. In practice, in my wallet, in the car, on the coffee table, in various tupperware containers, on the floor where I dropped it.....
---
Hrm. My memory says there was something about "two words" in this meme originally which seems to have been lost by the time I got it. Oh well. I never was good at brevity anyway.
More posting soon. Need to go kill a guy on Nexus Wars.
Um... meme?
1. Explain what ended your last relationship. He wanted no-commitment sex, I hadn't yet learned that I fall in love with anyone I sleep with, things ended predictably badly. At least I finally had the sense to end it myself. Learned later that he'd been cheating on me, but really, that was just salt to the wound at that point.
2. When was the last time you shaved? ...last year sometime? I dunno. Occasionally I get a fit of bad self-image and shave my pits, but really, me and razors? Not a good combo. And I'm frankly too lazy for the sustained effort shaving requires.
3. What were you doing this morning at 8 a.m.? Making like a log. Until the alarm went off, anyway. Curse you, foul contraption!
4. Were you any good at math? Eh. Not terrible, not great. No retention of skills whatsoever; I doubt I'd recognize a calculus equation these days if it bit me in the butt, although anything biting me in the butt is, on reflection, unlikely to be a calculus equation.
5. What were you doing 15 minutes ago? Either catching up on Battlestar Galactica (note to self: order anti-depressants), putting food in the oven, or playing Nexus Wars. I dunno. Clocks are foul contraptions too.
Food in the oven! ARGH!
6. Your prom night? ... Oh yay. Not burned.
Prom night? I was homeschooled, but I've heard of those. Some kind of torture session, right?
7. Do you have any famous ancestors? My aunt once paid someone to say we were related to some guy named Lafayette -- no, not that Lafayette, some other one who did something or the other during the War of 1812. Supposedly my last name is a corruption of his, which is actually the only likely bit about the whole story. It made my aunt happy, though. She's that kind of person.
8. Have you had to take a loan out for school? No. My extended family has money in an unassuming kind of way; they put me through college. Which was damned nice, I must say, and freed me from the silly obligation to "get a good job" using the magic piece o'paper and allowing me to use my years in college for the unique purpose of learning.
Not that I have Opinions on the educational system er anything.
9. Do you know the words to the song on your myspace profile? I will get a myspace profile when -- eh, actually? Even mild torture would do it. But voluntarily? Not so much.
10. Last thing received in the mail? A catalog from Heifer International. Go Heifer International! If I had money I might even give you some!
11. How many different beverages have you had today? Just water. The evil milk truck driver came and sucked away all my milk before I got to work. Curse the name of the milk truck driver! (Actually, I can't remember the name of the milk truck driver, so even if I was good at cursing he'd be safe.)
12. Do you ever leave messages on people's answering machine? Sure. In many cases I view this as superior to speaking to the actual person. See: Evil Contraptions.
13. Who did you lose your CONCERT virginity to? Jimmy Buffett. Yes, really. If you don't count the dozens of music festivals I attended from toddler age onward.
14. Do you draw your name in the sand when you go to the beach? No. I prefer making Easter Island faces. Or, better yet, playing the Wave Chasing game. But I haven't been to the beach very often, and about half the ones I have been to had no sand.
15. What's the most painful dental procedure you've had? Beats me. I haven't been to a dentist since I was six, because they wouldn't stop threatening my mother about how Dire Things would happen if I didn't get braces. So far the only Dire Thing has been an occasional cut on my inner lip from the jutting tooth. Frankly, if the choice is between two years of pain, sub-brace cavities, mouth sores, and no apples, and the occasional self-inflicted cut, I'm all about the bleeding.
16. What is out your back door? Porch, grill, backyard, and a bunch of very insolent deer.
17. Any plans for Friday night? Since I work most Saturdays, nope.
18. Do you like what the ocean does to your hair? I've only been swimming a few times in the ocean, and always with scuba gear. For the record, I don't like what scuba gear does to my hair (mostly, get caught in it).
19. Have you ever received one of those big tins of 3 different popcorns? It's possible a clueless relative gave us one once, but I doubt it.
20. Have you ever been to a planetarium? Not since I was ten.
21. Do you re-use towels after you shower? Is this some kind of trick question? Does anyone who does their own laundry actually use a new towel for every shower?
22. Some things you are excited about? World Fantasy, successful playing with PHP (more on this later), having a day off tomorrow, potentially getting time enough to write soon.
23. What is your favorite flavor of JELLO? The kind with fruit in is okay. Not really a Jell-O person.
24. Describe your keychain(s)? It used to be a great big green thing so I couldn't loose my keys. But I lost it. So now it's Dan's nifty flashlight-onna-keychain and one of those thingies that opens your car before you get there, in theory. This one is I think possessed by the Devil.
25. Where do you keep your change? In theory, in my wallet. In practice, in my wallet, in the car, on the coffee table, in various tupperware containers, on the floor where I dropped it.....
---
Hrm. My memory says there was something about "two words" in this meme originally which seems to have been lost by the time I got it. Oh well. I never was good at brevity anyway.
More posting soon. Need to go kill a guy on Nexus Wars.
Thursday, August 24
So I was on the road today, doing deliveries, when I passed... Route 666.
Yup. The Road to Hell exists, and it's about five miles out of Hillsville, Virginia. I couldn't tell whether it was paved with good intentions. A quick sideways glance suggested dead dinosaurs, just like the rest of America.
I wanted to share the infernal moment with Dan, but he was napping, and Hell hath no fury like a Dan awakened merely to look at Cool Stuff.
It got me thinking, though, about the Number of the Beast. This is one of the things we all know, bits of devilish lore as it were, but what does it actually mean?
So I visited my friend Wiki and my friend Google and came up with this.
Number of the Beast, The. Six hundred sixty six, "Six hundred threescore and six" according to the King James Bible. Or six hundred and sixteen according to the oldest known version of the verse, but this never really caught on. The Bible, like everything else, is subject to market forces, and 616 just ain't as catchy as 666.
Most people know what the Number of the Beast is, but not what the Number of the Beast means. The most cursory research reveals a reason for this: it appears in Revelation, which is the book of the Bible where God got generous with the mushrooms. Revelation 13 is not an easy read for anyone not on the same Volkswagen bus as John, but the gist of it seems to be: there's, like, this really evil beast, with seven heads, ten horns, the body of a leopard, the feet of a bear, and the mouth of a lion. But he's not the really really evil beast. That's the beast that heals the first beast, or maybe he made the first beast, or maybe the first beast isn't real at all but an image made to look like it's alive by the first beast -- look, that's not important, 'kay? The important bit is that the second beast is gonna put a mark on everybody, and unless they can, like, show the mark, they can't buy or sell anything, right? Totally evil! And the mark's a number, and the number is -- get this -- 666!
At this point, kind friends ought to have taken John away and given him some water and food and maybe a nice squeaky toy to play with until the pretty colors went away. But no, he wrote another nine chapters for Biblical scholars to spend upward of a millenium banging their heads on.
They've come up with some pretty interesting theories. Protestants have claimed that the Catholic Pope wears a phrase that equates to "666" on his tiara. More historical scholars have suggested that it refers to one of two Roman emperors, Nero and Diocletian. Modern theorists have variously identified the "mark" as a credit card, a social security number, a microchip, or a barcode. Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the beast refers to any human government. Other folks, with less scholarship but more confidence, have announced that the beast is paganism, the anti-Christ, Islam, Nazis, Ronald Reagan, and pretty much any government which has held enough power to be called "empire", with various clever ways of finding "666" associated with their target.
But the fact is, no one knows what the heck John was going on about, and no one knows what "the number of the beast" is, aside from a really nifty catchphrase for religious folks to shout about, superstitious people to obsess over, and heavy metal bands to advertise their rebellion with. It could be almost anything, from the demented rantings of a mushroom-eater to the demented rantings of a genuine psychic who'd gotten a look at a future utterly alien to him* to the demented rantings of a prophet who was, perhaps, too heavily touched by the finger of God to the not-so-demented rantings of a man writing in code to keep the nice soldiers from knocking down his door and dragging him off to play with the lions. No one's got a friggin' clue. And until we do, 666 is, and remains, just a number.
****
Hey, that was fun. Must spam the internets with more of this stuff sometime.
* Incidentally, a liberal reinterpretation of the Book of Revelation would make a kickass cyberpunk novel. I'm just sayin'.
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 404 words. Bah!
Comments: Crappy writing day. Of course, the fact that I was grumpy and snappy and spent a lot of time trying to fall asleep on various available surfaces/appliances/people suggests that the problem was not really with the book. Have decided to scrap the series of scenes that were supposed to be next and replace them with a series of scenes where stuff actually happens, which means revising the outline, but I don't wanna. See grumpy, snappy, etc.
Snips: "I sincerely hope you're lying through your teeth about my being above suspicion," Edison said dryly, "or I shall have to revise my opinion of you downwards."
Yup. The Road to Hell exists, and it's about five miles out of Hillsville, Virginia. I couldn't tell whether it was paved with good intentions. A quick sideways glance suggested dead dinosaurs, just like the rest of America.
I wanted to share the infernal moment with Dan, but he was napping, and Hell hath no fury like a Dan awakened merely to look at Cool Stuff.
It got me thinking, though, about the Number of the Beast. This is one of the things we all know, bits of devilish lore as it were, but what does it actually mean?
So I visited my friend Wiki and my friend Google and came up with this.
Number of the Beast, The. Six hundred sixty six, "Six hundred threescore and six" according to the King James Bible. Or six hundred and sixteen according to the oldest known version of the verse, but this never really caught on. The Bible, like everything else, is subject to market forces, and 616 just ain't as catchy as 666.
Most people know what the Number of the Beast is, but not what the Number of the Beast means. The most cursory research reveals a reason for this: it appears in Revelation, which is the book of the Bible where God got generous with the mushrooms. Revelation 13 is not an easy read for anyone not on the same Volkswagen bus as John, but the gist of it seems to be: there's, like, this really evil beast, with seven heads, ten horns, the body of a leopard, the feet of a bear, and the mouth of a lion. But he's not the really really evil beast. That's the beast that heals the first beast, or maybe he made the first beast, or maybe the first beast isn't real at all but an image made to look like it's alive by the first beast -- look, that's not important, 'kay? The important bit is that the second beast is gonna put a mark on everybody, and unless they can, like, show the mark, they can't buy or sell anything, right? Totally evil! And the mark's a number, and the number is -- get this -- 666!
At this point, kind friends ought to have taken John away and given him some water and food and maybe a nice squeaky toy to play with until the pretty colors went away. But no, he wrote another nine chapters for Biblical scholars to spend upward of a millenium banging their heads on.
They've come up with some pretty interesting theories. Protestants have claimed that the Catholic Pope wears a phrase that equates to "666" on his tiara. More historical scholars have suggested that it refers to one of two Roman emperors, Nero and Diocletian. Modern theorists have variously identified the "mark" as a credit card, a social security number, a microchip, or a barcode. Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the beast refers to any human government. Other folks, with less scholarship but more confidence, have announced that the beast is paganism, the anti-Christ, Islam, Nazis, Ronald Reagan, and pretty much any government which has held enough power to be called "empire", with various clever ways of finding "666" associated with their target.
But the fact is, no one knows what the heck John was going on about, and no one knows what "the number of the beast" is, aside from a really nifty catchphrase for religious folks to shout about, superstitious people to obsess over, and heavy metal bands to advertise their rebellion with. It could be almost anything, from the demented rantings of a mushroom-eater to the demented rantings of a genuine psychic who'd gotten a look at a future utterly alien to him* to the demented rantings of a prophet who was, perhaps, too heavily touched by the finger of God to the not-so-demented rantings of a man writing in code to keep the nice soldiers from knocking down his door and dragging him off to play with the lions. No one's got a friggin' clue. And until we do, 666 is, and remains, just a number.
****
Hey, that was fun. Must spam the internets with more of this stuff sometime.
* Incidentally, a liberal reinterpretation of the Book of Revelation would make a kickass cyberpunk novel. I'm just sayin'.
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 404 words. Bah!
Comments: Crappy writing day. Of course, the fact that I was grumpy and snappy and spent a lot of time trying to fall asleep on various available surfaces/appliances/people suggests that the problem was not really with the book. Have decided to scrap the series of scenes that were supposed to be next and replace them with a series of scenes where stuff actually happens, which means revising the outline, but I don't wanna. See grumpy, snappy, etc.
Snips: "I sincerely hope you're lying through your teeth about my being above suspicion," Edison said dryly, "or I shall have to revise my opinion of you downwards."
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