Book Foo!
Finished: Otherland, Vol 3: Mountain of Black Glass by Tad Williams
Started: The Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold

No detailed thoughts since it's part of a series and one part left to go. Still enjoying it though.

Started and Finished: Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow (available online, and read that way)

Thoughts behind the cut, not especially spoilery, though. ( Read more... )

Finished: Ventus, by Karl Schroeder (available free online, but I read it in book form)
Started: 13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction (short story collection, mostly stories from the 50s)

Ventus thoughts behind the cut. Not really spoilery. Short version: Quite liked it, will have to check out more by the author.
( Read more... )

What else? TVwise, Lost was good this week, BSG better than the last few, and Doctor's Daughter had some good moments but overall didn't satisfy. Don't really feel a need to go into it any more than that, though.

Haven't done one for quite a while, so let's do another Wiki Random Battle!

The Rules:
Go to Wikipedia, select Random Article twice, and pit the results against each other:

Round 1: The Cocoi Heron vs Sir Winston Churchill Public School
Results::
( Read more... )

Round 2: Gaston Leroux, Canadian politician vs Richard Beesly, British Rower
Results::
( Read more... )
Round 3: Baeocystin, a psychadelic mushroom component vs ProgressSoft, a software development company
( Read more... )

Lifewise, well, nothing else really new. When is anything? My life unchanges. Yes, my life is so static that it forces 'unchange' to somehow be a real verb.

Edit: Oh, and it's around that time of year for Networks to announce their schedules. A few networks have already announced their slates, and this site I've found has given me a good roundup of them in the past.

At approximately 4pm EST, on August 30th, 2007, CNN officially died.

They just used the words "According to Wikipedia" as part of a story that had nothing to do with Wikipedia.

Over the last month or so, there's something been quietly going on at Wikipedia that you may not have noticed yet. They're removing nearly all of the spoiler warning tags.

Now, this itself wouldn't bother me too much. I'll explain my feelings more behind the cut. The main thing is that it's how it's done rather than specifically what's being done. ( Read more... )

So, thanks to anyone who crossed fingers. We got the apartment!

Haven't officially signed the lease yet, but we got approved and so should be moving in March 1.

As I said last post, th eplace is about the same size, nicer, in the same neighborhood, and the rent is cheaper. The only thing more I could ask for is hot single female neighbors, and that's still an option as we haven't met any of them yet. ;)

It'll also be the highest I've ever lived - 4th floor. Which isn't all that high all things considered, but still, again, highest I've ever lived.

In other news... well, not much has been happening. I'm in another writing cycle, working well on a couple short story ideas, and aside from that I've been working on wiki lately, both patrolling for vandalism on the Recent Changes page (which for some reason makes me feel productive), and also beefing up and/or creating the entries for various New Universe stuff. In particular, Scuzz has his own wiki page now thanks to me! ;) And a couple of other DP7ers. I'm still working, and will go to Psi-Force after that.

A couple dreams over the last week or so, didn't feel like writing any of them up as solo entries: ( Read more... )

We've gotten a couple more video games around here over the last couple weeks. Of course, the PS2 isn't in my room so I haven't played them too much. We got Ultimate Spider-Man and X-Men Legends 2.( Read more... )

From video games to TV: We're almost at the official start of the return of cool TV. We've just had a few shows here and there for the last few weeks. I'll talk behind the cut but be non-spoilery, don't worry:( Read more... )

So, writing week one is over, so I'm off-again from a week. I think it went fairly well... a bit of a slog at times, but at least with the promise of a break ahead it helps me slog through them. Mostly I worked on a couple longer form works, but I did start and finish a short story, based on a random idea I had walking home. Once I edit, I'll probably actually post it online cause I'm not all that pleased with it. I know that sounds assbackwards, but it makes sense: the stuff I think might be at least halfway decent I'll try to get published in a magazine or something, and some of them are picky about buying a work if it's appeared anywhere else, including simply online. So, directly posting something usually means I don't intend to try to get it published. But it still needs some cleaning up. Not that I think the story's horrible or anything though, or I'd be too embarassed to post it at all. And, most importantly, I got it done. I've mentioned before finishing is always a big problem.

And before I go, Yet another edition of Wiki Random Battle:

The rules: Go to Wikipedia, select Random Article twice, and pit the results against each other:

Round 1: South African Football Player Hans Volk vs. the Brandi Doll ( Read more... )
Round 2: A conscription crisis vs. "Mind your own business". ( Read more... )

The Bad News is, today was the first time I didn't meet my 2000 word goal. I only got roughly a thousand in the two hours I'd blocked off for myself. Total so far is 7303 words written in November.

The Good News: I finished a short story! This is big, for me. ( Read more... )

To celebrate with a little goofing off, here's another Wikipedia Random Battle!

This time: The Togo political movement Juvento vs The Sunrunners of Goddess Keep, fictional charaters

Results: ( Read more... )

So far I've only done two days worth of my PerExWriMo (where I'm devoting 2 hours of writing every non-work day). My word count is at 4363. Now that might not seem much compared to you NaNoWriMoers (those who are on track, anyway), but I'm aiming at a more personal goal, and that's far more than I've ever written before on a PerExWriMo.

Right now I'm feeling good about dedicating a block of writing time and may continue it even after November ends. We'll see if that feeling lasts when I run out of the first blush of excitement for the story I'm working on and get into a block where I can't think of anything to write. I'm not doing a novel, either, which helps some. I have the attention span of a gnat sometimes, so I'm flitting back and forth between a number of projects that interest me. Most of the writing (over 3k words) is on a short story I just started and have a good grasp on, with some of the rest split between a few older projects.

And just for fun...

The Wikipedia Random Battle!

The rules: Go to Wikipedia, select Random Article twice, and pit the results against each other:

Round 1: Porn star Keisha vs. The Valley Oak

Results: ( Read more... )

Round 2: Bottom Meadow a UK sports venue, vs Bradford City Police an English Police department. Pure coincidence that they're both in the same country.

Results: ( Read more... )

Round 3: The town of Kununurra in Western Australia, vs. Innerwish, a Greek Power Metal band
Results: ( Read more... )

Played our first game of Cybergeneration today.
( Read more... )

Oh, and I've been going a bit more nuts on the wiki front, feeling much more free to edit stuff that I see that's incorrect or incomplete, and added a new page of limited interest: The Clinic for Paranormal Research from DP7 and also added a fair bit of info to their Psi-Force page.

First up, Dream Foo! ( Read more... )

Spoiler-light TV bits: Veronica Mars, Grey's Anatomy, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Torchwood
( Read more... )

I created my very first Wikipedia page this weekend. I've done some minor edits before, but this is the first time I've created a whole page. It will no doubt interest nobody on my friends list, of course. Anyway, what happened was, while I was rereading the Grainger/Hooded Swan books, I did a wiki search for it, like I tend to do for most series I read. Only to come up empty. Not only has barely anybody I talk to heard of it, nobody'd created a page for it. So, I did. I'll probably be adding a little more to it as time goes on. It's an interesting feeling, adding to the sum total of human knowledge on the internet. And the editing was remarkably easy, I've never actually looked into how to edit a wiki before a couple weeks ago. I'll probably be doing more of it when I see something that needs doing. I'm a wikiconvert!

Speaking of writing (but from another angle), I don't think I'm going to do NaNoWriMo. Can't come up with a plot I want to use on it, and I don't want to 'waste' any of the plots I've got stored up on it (I put waste in quotes because I don't technically think it's a waste, but I fear that if I do the style of writing NaNo requires and it sucks I won't be able to write the story again. If I'm to do it, I need a plot that I can feel good using only for it). Also the time issue is a worry. I don't really feel up to writing on days that I work, so that means I'd have to extra load it on the other days, and all that in addition to doing things like my alternaljournal which is certainly a type of writing, but wouldn't count towards words.

Ehh. Anyway, to do my best to keep the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I'm going to resolve to do the following (whether I actually do it is another matter, but I'll resolve it here and either do it or fess up to not doing it): ( Read more... )

Apparently we're getting pretty close to being able to play our first Cybergeneration (tabletop) game, so that should be cool.

Now, let's see, is there anything actually new in my life, as opposed to the various ways I escape reality?... Hmmm, nope, not really that I can think of. But then, why would it? About the only chance I have to meet anyone new would be either at work or in chance encounters. And, well, why not, some social interaction to report: ( Read more... )