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Saturday, July 19th, 2008
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11:46 pm
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In the past month, I've finally started watching the new Doctor Who. Funny, I don't remember the old Who ever making me cry this much.
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| Tuesday, December 25th, 2007
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3:58 pm
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*sigh* I miss having cable. I never thought I would, but I'm trying to watch Holidays on Ice while I write this and had to spend 10 minutes fussing with the antenna to get something barely visible through all the static. I've never been a huge TV fan and didn't worry about it in Takoma Park; sure, I'd have liked to have Sci-Fi and Discovery and History, but I never cared about it enough to pay for it. But now that I can't afford it, I'm here in Asheville, which has only one local television affiliate -- everything else comes from South Carolina. I get ABC and the UNC public station, and they're the only ones that come in well. On a good day, if I cross my fingers and fiddle with the antenna and ignore the ghosts and static lines, I can get Fox and NBC to mostly come in. No CBS or even regular PBS at all. It's far more frustrating than I expected it to be.
Of course, if it weren't so static-y, I'd probably just find something else to be frustrated about -- like NBC's horrible handling of their ice skating. *rolls eyes* They've got Todd Eldredge and Philippe Candeloro on the ice, and they keep taking the camera off them and putting it on Clay Aiken instead! Like anyone watching this really cares about Clay Aiken's face. Please. I'll be so glad when the NBC ice skating contract expires.
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| Sunday, December 23rd, 2007
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5:33 pm
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John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise is, overall, a waste of time -- amusing once in a while, but not nearly enough to make up for the six hours of your life the audiobook consumes that you will never see again. I am exceedingly glad that I downloaded it when it was free instead of spending $20 on it.
However, it does include more than one reference to Bryn Mawr being a school of witchcraft and is therefore not completely unredeemable. *g*
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| Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
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1:00 pm - Fandom strike funds
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I'm not going to go into why we should support the writers' strike -- other people have done that elsewhere, and it could quickly get TL;DR. But many fans are wondering what they can do to help. Already people are donating bits of money here and there for things like pizza and coffee, and there's been talk of paying for more Variety or insider publication ads.
Now, I donated my $40 to the Sentinel ad campaign way back when, which I believe was the first of the kind. But I think such an ad campaign now would be a big mistake. We all know the studios care more about our money than about our opinions, and who do you think would be getting our money if we paid for ads, pretty much anywhere? That's right, the BIG MEDIA CONGLOMERATES!
Instead, I'd like to suggest that fans give their money to the people who need it -- the writers and the other people who will be out of work once production on their shows stops. Let's set up our own fan-supported strike funds for the people who give us our favorite shows.
Right now, a strike fund -- something that would pay out small weekly stipends to those who need it -- may seem a bit over the top, but if this goes on for months, as it's likely to, both the writers and the below-the-line people are going to need all the help they can get, not for snacks and Starbucks but for basic needs for their families. Show-based strike funds could help the people who make our shows and send a message to the studios -- two messages, actually, both about our support for the strike and about which shows we really want to watch.
I come up with ideas and rant about them, but I'm not so good at implementing them. But I'm hoping that if I seed the idea in enough places, the fans who are good at implementing will pick it and run with it.
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| Friday, October 5th, 2007
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1:57 am
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| Sunday, September 16th, 2007
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10:59 pm - Lyrics for prompts
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| Sunday, August 26th, 2007
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4:58 pm
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Yes, I'm still alive. I appreciate the inquiries, even if I haven't replied to them. I wish I were the sort of person who could consistently respond appropriately to such overtures, but I'm not, and I'm sure you all know that by now. These days I can't imagine that I ever could be.
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| Sunday, April 22nd, 2007
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11:25 pm
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All praise and glory be to the Online Books Page, which allows one to begin reading hefty tomes a scant 15 minutes after deciding to embark upon the reading, notwithstanding the lack of a library open at 11 at night or a bus to get there if there were such a library. For that matter, even if I had my own copy of Bleak House (I'm not entirely sure that I don't), it would probably still be quicker to find online than in my piles and stacks.
I'm quite sure that the true heroes of our age are the typists and scanners and whatnot that make Project Gutenberg and similar sites possible.
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7:41 pm
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Catch the pretty Google logo for Earth Day? No? Here's the archive for all their special logos. They had a St. George and the Dragon one in 2002, and a DNA logo in 2003! And the 2003 Earth Day logo has aliens watching the Earth. *g* I always suspected I was missing a bunch of cool ones, and yep, I was. Lots of space-oriented ones I missed. Gotta wonder how they get chosen... there was one for the Venus transit in 2004, as well as more obvious things like Spirit landing on Mars.
Well, there it goes. Yes, Smudge has now succeeded at knocking every single piece of paper off my desk. Oh, well, I wasn't planning on being useful tonight anyway.
current music: "Belede," Jim Donovan Drumming Workshop
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| Wednesday, December 27th, 2006
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11:05 pm
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*sigh*
Every time something like the holidays or my recent conversation with ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) travelingtim reminds me that other people exist in time and I really should make an effort to sync with them, some freakazoid comes along right after and reminds me that humans in general are irrational, ugly masses of incomprehensible nastiness and the ones who haven't been previously vetted really are just best avoided.
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| Saturday, December 2nd, 2006
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11:16 pm
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I've never been very happy with my skin tone, although I no longer actively dislike it the way I did when I was younger. It's both too yellow and too red for my tastes. And of course you can't grow up in Florida without getting something of a permanent tan, no matter how little you want one, and I wanted to be a Goth before I knew what Goth was, even when all the "cool kids" were busy trying to give themselves skin cancer. I loved Miranda's skin tone and the historical romance descriptions of ivory-skinned heroines. And I was trying to wear as much black as I could even in grade school, though my mother protested and kept trying to dress me in hated yellows and pastels (which, as an adult, I can now knowingly say I look horribly sallow and washed out in; by choice, I'll go for the cool jewel tones every time. Well, almost every time -- I make the occasional exception for EYESHATTERING AZALEA pink). My mother claimed it was morbid, but I just wanted to look mysterious and sophisticated. Black wasn't about death for me but about the night sky -- it still is.
There was one Goth couple in my 2000-student high school in southern Florida in the mid-80s. I didn't know they were Goth, just that they were the most beautiful things I'd ever seen, besides the moon. I think they were seniors when I was a frosh, and I only saw them a few times, but they made quite the impression. I never wanted to be them, though; I just wanted to lick them up like melted ice cream and absorb them into me, meld their essence with mine as a catalyst for transformation, into something richer and more strange than either of us.
The actual Goth community, once I found out there was one, has never really appealed to me, other than as eye candy. Gothic fashion, oh yes, if I had the money and could get away with wearing it to the office. But I look at Goth- or ivory- or pale-labeled skins online and I think "That's not pale, that's dead. My avatar isn't a corpse." The rich and multilayered sound of the music, definitely, but the lyrics, the whole atmospheric thing? Not. Nice place to visit, but... It's too easy for me to fall into the dark as it is; I don't need to throw myself into it intentionally. And black is still best when it's embracing the full, bright moon -- or sparkling with fairy lights in pink and blue and green and white.
***
I still miss my hat. Come to think of it, I miss the black velvet skirt and burgundy sweater I'm wearing in that pic as well. Both are long since gone to moths.
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| Friday, November 17th, 2006
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10:04 am
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Meme from ladycat777, the most significant SF/F novels from 1953-2006 according to Time:
Bold the ones you've read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.
*The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
*Dune, Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
*A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
*Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
*The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
*The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
*Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer
I am a bad science fiction fan. Not having read them all doesn't bother me, because time... time... gaah. But there are several titles I either don't even recognize or know of but never thought were anything important. Of course, who says Time is qualified to judge?
I am atypically consumed with a desire to catch up on the personal lives of everyone on my flist that I haven't been reading. And, of course, I have no time to do it in. Have spent too much time just browsing my flist already this morning; must go be productive.
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| Sunday, November 12th, 2006
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1:28 pm
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Randomness:
I was just sitting at my desk fussing with my playlist, finished, and stood back up to go back to cleaning the kitchen. A motion and a route I take a dozen or more times a day, but this time my foot caught on something painful. I looked down, expecting a splinter from the wonderful rickety old wooden bench I'm using as a desk chair these days.
It was a broken piece of costume jewelry that I've never seen before, in the middle of my living room.
It's rather pretty, though in poor condition. I think it came from a ring; it's a golden circle with those pointy metal pieces that bend to connect a setting to a ring? The probably-acrylic "stone" has residue on it, as if something had been pasted on the front, which is a bit odd, since it would cover most of the stone, but the stone itself is a very pretty blue with just a touch of teal.
There is absolutely nothing I own that it could have come from.
Perhaps it fell off someone's costume at Samhain and got caught in my dragging lace hem. But if that were the case, how did I manage to miss a thumbnail-sized and dangerously pointy bit of colorful sparkly in the middle of my most-traveled path for two weeks?
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| Tuesday, November 7th, 2006
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10:41 pm
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I didn't vote today. I feel like I probably ought to feel guilty about this, but I don't. I've always voted in presidential elections and am very critical of people who don't. I've often skipped the midterm elections -- I used to move around so much I never felt invested in wherever I was, and rarely knew enough about the local candidates for my vote to really matter. Still, I've never before skipped a midterm election where I felt the results mattered, and I really really dislike the Republican incumbent in my new district.
But I only had a couple hours free in which I could have gotten to the polls, and for the first time in all my many moves, the local elections board was giving me hassle over changing my registration. I never did receive my new voter registration card, or any of the election mail that starts pouring in when you register in an election year, and since I don't have any other valid ID, I was anticipating problems at the polls. Paranoid, perhaps, but there you go. And I just felt that I could get more accomplished, do more that would more effectively affect my future, by staying home. So I did, and I don't feel guilty about it.
And hee! The anti-gay, rapid-Republican incumbent just conceded as I was writing that last sentence! And relatively early in the counting, too. :-)
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| Friday, November 3rd, 2006
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10:00 am
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Wonder what the spark is
When you turn your eyes on me
Some kind of magic and it will not let me be
Rip! goes reality, walls are falling down
Snap! goes the iron chain
That ties me to the ground
Floating together Light as a feather
Floating together Forever
In your eyes
I see sparks and comets burning
Shooting stars and planets turning
Cracks in the ceiling
I am floating through the gap
Me and Marco Polo, falling off the map
Rip! went reality, shook me to the core
Now I know this isn't Kansas any more
Floating together Light as a feather
Floating together Forever
In your eyes
I see earthquakes, mountains sliding
New born suns and worlds colliding
Falling through the universe,
Spinning round and round and round
Meeting at infinity, never to be found
Was that coincidence? Was it really chance?
When God is on the bodhran,
The atoms want to dance
In your eyes
I see big rock candy mountains
Pools of Guinness, sherbet fountains
In your eyes
-- Oysterband
If you're going to have recorded music instead of drums, that's what I want to be dancing to.
And hey, there's an Oysterband community on Livejournal! ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) oysterfans
current music: "Barbie Girl", Rammstein
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| Wednesday, November 1st, 2006
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4:52 pm
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Merry Samhain, everyone!
His Smudgeship and I had a bit of a traumatic experience last night. As I was preparing for bed, he suddenly started mrowling badly and making unpleasantly odd motions with his head and wide open mouth. I never did figure out exactly what happened -- he was upset and wouldn't stay still long enough for me to get a good look -- but somehow, something on his collar got caught on something in his mouth, or vice versa. Fortunately, he got himself free while I was still trying to figure out how to get him to stay still, and he seemed fine immediately afterward, which was much of a relief -- I was picturing bloody gums or a ripped tongue, and trying to remember if there's a 24-hour vet hospital nearby. But I took his collar off afterwards and I'm afraid to put it back on. And now he wants his daily Kitty Constitutional outside, but I'm also afraid to let him out without a collar. And I dreamed this morning about him throwing up snakes, lots of them. Which actually makes perfect sense, given the things that were floating about my head, but it was rather alarming all the same.
I'm a little ambivalent about last night's ritual. I'm certainly glad I went, but since I wasn't part of the spiral dance, I missed the main experience of the ritual. In fact, I didn't have much experience of the ritual at all -- we called the quarters to open, very briefly, and I was part of the closing, but all the middle I missed, not just the physical running around of the spiral dance, but the magick. I just didn't feel any magick going on, any energy being raised. And the double nature of the spiral meant that half the time the spirallers weren't anywhere near me but at the opposite end of the field, so it was hard to feel like I was really part of it, even if they were dancing around me the other half the time. Still, everyone else seemed to think it went great.
Part of my ambivalence with last night -- and the reason the compliments I got surprised me -- is that I was never really in a good trance. At one point, the high priestess said something to the people near her about my being "in the zone", and all I could think was "uh, nooooo." I've danced for the Stones at Four Quarters and for various bale fires, and that's "in the zone," but I wasn't last night. I was barely deeper than I would be dancing for fun at home, or counting spiders, or crunching acorns. Part of the problem was the field. I'd cleared the pathways of the spiral, but wasn't expecting anyone, much less me, to be at that center spot and hadn't focused on it. So I had a small space to move in to begin with, made even smaller by people circling around me, and smaller still by vine tangles impeding my footwork. When the dancers were on my side of the labyrinth, my feet were practically planted to the ground, and even when they were gone, I couldn't really move my feet without paying careful, conscious attention to where I was putting them, which rather interfered with getting into it. And the sense of restriction didn't really match the Life symbolism. Another problem was the drums -- or lack of same. I'm used to feeding the drums, and feeding off the drums, but last night there was only one lone drummer a fair way aways from me, and often drowned out by the recorded music. And the music itself was often not something I would have chosen to dance to, and even when it was a tune I liked, it wasn't loud enough. And the music I liked was Celtic! You try dancing to jigs and reels with your feet planted to the ground. *g* Also, I felt like I ought to have had some vibey-thing going with the other Life dancer, but I felt more of a relationship with the sheet-on-a-stick at the other center point than I did with either of the men dancing at my point (they switched off, I didn't). I can dance with other people around, but I'm not using to dancing with someone else, and they felt far more alien to me than the thorns and torches and scarecrow. I was all around just too conscious of everything practical around me and couldn't help thinking of what it should be like instead of just being what it was.
But earlier I mentioned dancing for the Stones and for bale fires, and that was the biggest problem -- I never really knew who or what I was dancing for, or who or what I was serving. I sort of skipped around between the Moon and the elements and the spirallers, but never really with anything to surrender to. Result: no trance. Perhaps it would have been different if I'd had more information about the rite as a whole, had done a run-through ahead of time, instead of being told 30 seconds after entering the labyrinth "we need a dancer at that spot" and then being mostly isolated from everything else. I mean, a few of the spirallers called me the "Goddess dancer", which is reasonable terminology given that it was a male-female pair, but the symbolism is a bit sketchy given that we were opposite Death, and the Lord and Lady are hardly apart from Death. The next day, I still don't know if it was Oldenwilde's intention that we be representing Goddess and God or just the more abstract forces of Life, or whether that was the overall effect or just the impression of a few random people.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still glad I did it. And not just to save the hem of my gown, bedraggled as it now is. The above is meant only as port-mortem, not as complaint. Still, it wasn't the fun or engrossing experience that a good large ritual is for me.
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2:04 am
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Just got back from Oldenwilde's public Samhain ritual. Yes, it's 1:30 in the morning. Am exhausted, but am also starved, so I might as well type while I wait for my supper to heat. Also, my feet are filthy and thorn-scratched, and I have a puncture wound in my big toe, but these are just minor discomforts.
I had meant to write a long detailed entry today about my wonderful moving journey last Halloween, but the ritual space this year was out beyond public transportation range, and the only person I could bum a ride with was one of the volunteers who was going several hours early to help with set up. So instead of spending this afternoon writing, I spent it combing the spiral dance path with hedge clippers trying to remove briars and other pedestrian hazards. I'd been looking forward to the dance -- I always look forward to spiral dances -- but after finally giving up and declaring that no amount of effort could make that thorn-filled field safe for bare feet, I was actually considering sitting it out. My feet, hands, and ankles were already Grievously Wounded, and I didn't fancy dragging my ankle-length lace ritual dress through the thorns and mud.
As it turned out, I didn't do the spiral dance, but only because I ended up as one of the two symbolic dancers in the center of the labyrinth. Well, one of the centers -- the dance path was a double spiral with a scarecrow-ghosty thing in the other center. I got a lot of compliments on my dancing, so I suppose that's as good a way as any to introduce myself to the local pagan community. Also, it didn't involve being dragged along by running dancers while trying not to trip over my hem -- just a couple stints of trying to quickly un-entangle thorn vines from my legs and the lace while the spiral dancers were on the Death side of the field before they got back around to our side. ;-)
Want sleep and food, now, not necessarily in that order.
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| Friday, October 27th, 2006
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8:14 pm
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Hee! Linus is obviously pagan.
And I love the LiveJournal Halloween theme. ;-)
current music: Charlie Brown & The Great Pumpkin
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| Saturday, September 23rd, 2006
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7:03 pm
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One of my trees just gave me an acorn. :-) My patio is already covered with them, but I was outside just now and had left the front door open, hoping to entice the scaredy-cat to rejoin me after a passing car had sent him running inside again. I was passing near the door just in time to see an acorn come flying through the air and land spinning in the foyer. I am easily delighted these days.
Also, I can count eight different clusters of pine cones high in the trees above my patio. I don't think I've ever seen a pine cone actually still on the tree before. I've seen clusters of them for craft purposes before, and the occasional pair crashed on the sidewalk, but I always thought of them as things that grew singly, not in clusters. It's neat to see them clumped together still in the trees. I just hope they don't decide to fall on my head one of these days, or worse, on the scaredy cat's. He already jumps at every little noise, after living through three out-of-state moves and two hurricanes; he doesn't need a pine-cone-generated concussion too.
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| Wednesday, September 20th, 2006
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7:14 am
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My poor alarm clock is so pathetic. It's a no-name brand that's at least 25 years old -- it used to be the living room clock when I was little and looks hopelessly retro nowadays. It still works, though. But it no longer has the strident, turn-it-off-immediately-to-protect-your-eardrums alarm that it used to. For the past few years, when the alarm goes off, it instead makes this whimpering, keening warble, as if it's too miserable and breathless to have the strength for a full-throated wail. It's very sad.
I bought a newer one once, back when it was still full-throated, hoping for something that was a little less strident and more pleasant to start off the day with, and the alarm broke the first time the clock was dropped. So much for modern technology.
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