p1k3::2000/11
new
all
2001
2000
1999
chapbook
hack
Wednesday, November 29, 21:01 CST
Today's AWAD quote bears repeating:
In the midst of great joy, do not promise anyone anything. In
the midst of great anger, do not answer anyone's letter. -Chinese
proverb
Anyway...
Watched "Comes the Inquisitor" earlier
tonight. Powerful episode, and probably my favorite, next
to "Z'ha'dum" (which is pretty much my favorite hour of
television, ever).
SFC has been
running heavy promos for their upcoming Dune miniseries... And you
know I'll be watching. You know I'd be watching even if I *knew* it was
going to be a trainwreck, but the trailers are enough to give me a sliver of
hope. A very, very small sliver. Not really even one you could see with the
naked eye. But it's there.
(I'm assuming the SFC's section for the miniseries is at /dune/, but I can't get past their Flash
detection with Opera to check, and I find that I don't even care enough to
check it out with Lynx. Not exactly the first instance of 'net cluelessness
they've demonstrated, I guess.)
Skimming through a 2-year old IRC log last night, I came across an argument
over whether anything worthwhile would ever come of the rumored Sci-Fi Channel
Dune project...
Wonder if I can finish a re-read by Sunday night?
2000
November
29
:: write in the margins
Monday, November 27, 15:50 CST
Finished up my brief
Unbreakable review, added a bit to
yesterday's update.
Now back to working on one of those ambitious ideas...
2000
November
27
:: write in the margins
Sunday, November 26, 17:15 CST
I'm back. As ever, with the usual host of ambitious ideas that accumulate
every time I'm away from a computer for a few days, which will probably go
nowhere.
Thanksgiving was mostly good; we went to my grandma's house, saw relatives,
ate too much, the usual. Well, not entirely the usual, but it was good
anyway. Saw my cousin Rachel, who's getting married next year. And wow, is
that still a strange thought.
Everything changes.
Managed to read Jo Walton's The King's Peace, and see
Unbreakable. Both good, and both deserving of a full length review.
Have most of the Unbreakable review written, in fact... Just need to
finish it up and post.
Using the Mac at home last night, I downloaded iCab, a lightweight (1.2 meg) shareware web
browser. As a rule, I don't envy Macintosh users their choice of software, but
iCab is definitely one of the few exceptions. Renders pages nicely, easily
customizable, and packed with cool little touches. Stuff like a built in HTML
validator, image and JavaScript filtering, and graphical counterparts to Lynx features like listing all of the links
on a page and making actual use of LINK tags...
2000
November
26
:: write in the margins
Tuesday, November 21, 12:02 CST
Ahhhh, done for the week. Thanksgiving break is a goodness.
Handy tip for making life easier under Linux: Start up an xterm, set the
font size to Small
or lower (hold down control and right click in the
window, you'll get a handy popup), resize it to a cute little box, stick it
in a corner. Then whenever you feel the need to run some random command but
don't need it to be interactive, you can just alt-tab or move the mouse
over it instead of starting a new terminal. If you need to look at output,
piping it to xless seems to work quite well, and if you *do* need to open
it in another xterm, using xterm -e command &
is easy
enough...
I'm fairly certain there're dockapps that do the same thing, but at the
moment I'm too lazy to go looking.
JMS'
latest
column is the kind of advice I ought to be taking.
Anyway, think I'll go home and be indolent for a while now. In case I don't
write anything here for the remainder of the week, happy Thanksgiving, all!
2000
November
21
:: write in the margins
Monday, November 20, 23:54 CST
Gurney: Wow, you're right. I could rattle off a BASIC program in no time at
all right now. It's still...right there.
'Course, I did write approximately two billion cheesy little text games in
BASIC, so that might have helped....
Brennen: LOL!
I'd say you topped my output by approximately half a billion.
Gurney: heh. As a local sword swallower puts it, "Evidence of a
mis-spent youth."
Monday, November 20, 15:52 CST
Listening to "The
Squirming Coil" and playing with a slinky.
(Phish on
dmoz)
Just spent several hours rearranging Ye Olde Dorm Room. That was way too
thought intensive.
Watching my roommate re-install Windows, after a week of increasing
frustration with a bizarre bug that pops up a little "Setting up
Personalized Settings" box as it starts and then freezes. Can't help but
feel that I should've figured it out by now, but I'm pretty much clueless.
Oh yeah... Laurel won, 34-0. And watching that definitely would've been
cooler than, say, taking an essay test over the French Revolution. Though
actually I'd have to say my world history class is probably the one I enjoy
most, at least in terms of the subject matter.
"Have you ever heard of a thing called an assassin? They're
known for assassinations." - Some guy out in the hall
2000
November
20
:: write in the margins
Friday, November 17, 1:37 CST
Well, I was going strong on the whole studying thing, 'til I succumbed to the
lure of playing Dead or Alive 2, a game I've become downright addicted
to, in a friend's room.
Walking back to my dorm across a silent campus, watching snow drift down
from a nearly cloudless sky is an experience I would have missed, if I'd been
better at resisting temptation. I think I'm ahead for the night, one way or
another.
2000
November
17
:: write in the margins
Thursday, November 16, 19:27 CST
Well, I've been sitting here all day, doing essentially nothing, beyond aimless
web surfing and messing with e-mail. I didn't even read
rec.arts.sf.written, which means I'm
probably about 5000 articles behind. I would check, but if I did that it'd be
far too easy to read a post or two or a hundred, and I probably wouldn't
escape for at least two hours.
Stuff bookmarked while aimlessly browsing:
I'd really kind of like to go to Lincoln, and watch Laurel play for
the (Nebraska, class C2) state football championship tomorrow. Unfortunately,
I have a quiz at 9:00 and a test at 10. The game is at 11. I suppose I could
have found a way around this, if I'd actually thought about it prior to this
afternoon.
(Interesting to note that though the
LCHS site is still an ugly mess, it's
an ugly mess considerably improved over what was there when I was supposed to
be working on it, a year ago. High on the list of things I'm quite grateful my
name isn't attached to in any visible way.)
Now I am going to do some studying.
I keep meaning to stop procrastinating, but I always wind up putting it off
a few days...
Thursday, November 16, 13:35 CST
Well, it didn't snow enough to get any class cancelled... Ah well.
Messing around with that little table cell over to the right of the
page. Nothing much of any use there yet.
Thursday, November 16, 0:22 CST
Snow, I say, SNOW!
2000
November
16
:: write in the margins
Tuesday, November 14, 19:51 CST
"If only for a little while..."
I've missed a couple of good B5 episodes, but I did catch
"Acts of Sacrifice" tonight. One of my
favorite season 2 eps.
Great. Not only is Amazon.com spamming me with increasing frequency - now
they're doing it in HTML. (Let's stamp out inline-HTML
E-Mails.)
I mentioned Bright Weavings, Guy G. Kay's official site, a
while back... There's some nifty new stuff up there - a
speech on privacy and fiction
which makes some interesting points (especially when considered in the light
of Kay's almost-but-not-quite-historical fantasy), and a low traffic
discussion board.
2000
November
14
:: write in the margins
Monday, November 13, 16:07 CST
My dad dropped my keys off at the front desk... A definite relief.
Ever stop to think about the innumerable little tokens and talismans without
which you'd find it almost impossible to move through society? Keys, licenses,
cards, permits, stickers, badges, barcodes, tickets, certificates...
I sense the seeds of an interesting rant here, somewhere.
Ok, I said I was going to keep updating the little weblog like section over
on POV, so I suppose I should go do that.
2000
November
13
:: write in the margins
Sunday, November 12, 21:25 CST
Snow. Cold. Wind.
Might have a real winter this year.
Went home (of course) this weekend. Did very little of anything much. My
Aunt Connie was here from Chicago, which is always cool.
Forgot my keys at home. Sometimes, I amaze even myself.
Watched K-State (marginally) beat Nebraska last night. As every year, in a
room full of K-State alumni and native Nebraskans. Heck of a game, but there's
no way I'm taking sides.
Poured a couple of candles this weekend, something I've been doing once in a
while for years... It'd no doubt be a lot more exacting a craft if I knew what
I was doing. Then again, how exacting can "melt wax, pour in mold"
really get?
2000
November
12
:: write in the margins
Wednesday, November 8, 21:25 CST
Just posted a
review of Princess Mononoke.
Wednesday, November 8, 11:48 CST
To finish where I left off rambling about dedicated gaming systems...
I've never been a huge console gamer, though I have killed quite a few hours
on machines (Nintendos and SNES's and Ataris and Gameboys and Playstations...)
owned by friends. 2D platform games and beat 'em ups aside, the kind of stuff I
enjoy hasn't really been done (or done well) on console systems - first person
shooters and Wing Commander style space combat, for example.
These days though, with the lines between PCs and consoles blurring ever
more, and a growing number of games that're worth the play time, it's getting
much more tempting to buy one of the latest round of systems. Especially since
the multiplayer dynamic on a console system is an entirely different thing from
that you'll find in most computer games - not better, but equally worth
experiencing, I think. Granted, a new computer provides more bang for the
buck, and there's still no way a console system can keep up with the
development of new PC stuff, but there are advantages to that - notice how much
performance console developers manage to squeeze out of a static system like
the Playstation, even now? I only wish PC game developers would even attempt
to make that much of what they have to work with...
Er, anyway. Time to go to class again.
Wednesday, November 8, 8:46 CST
Well, Mystery, Alaska wasn't all that bad. Not great or
anything, but it did have its moments. Would've been much improved if it
weren't trying to cover so much ground, I think.
Woke up vaguely wondering who won the (US) presidential election, and how
much I really cared... There's something gratifying about turning on the TV and
finding out that no one else knows either.
Suppose I should go to class.
2000
November
8
:: write in the margins
Tuesday, November 7, 23:11 CST
(Cool Music Plug: Goldfinger's cover of 99 Red Balloons rocks. Search your
local Napster equivalent now. I figure out what album this is on, I'm buying
it. Thank you, Much Music.)
Just spent a couple of hours playing Dead or Alive 2 in 4 player
tag-team mode on a friend's DreamCast...
My first impression was "pretty but brainless" (very, very
pretty)... After actually taking time to get used to the controls though, I
think I'm hooked. It's maybe not quite as well rounded as something like
Tekken 3, but it makes up for it with a control scheme and gameplay
that are actually 3D, using the little analog doohickey above the direction
pad on the DreamCast's controller to control movement on the ground, along with
featuring walls and multilevelled combat arenas that actually have a big effect
on play. And the 4 player tag team mode adds an incredible dynamic to the game
that's probably the coolest multiplayer experience I've ever had on a
console...
Rant to be continued after I finish watching Mystery, Alaska.
2000
November
7
:: write in the margins
Monday, November 6, 18:54 CST
Sounds like Laurel's winning 14-6... Would've gone to the game, but it's sort of
cold, windy, and snowing. Looks nice and picturesque from my window, but I'm
guessing it'd suck to stand around in. Especially on top of a hill, facing
directly into the wind...
2000
November
6
:: write in the margins
Sunday, November 5, 18:31 CST
Ooh, new Simpsons.
Just spent a couple of hours getting sort of caught up on
rec.arts.sf.written, came across a couple
of cool links.
Jo Walton's
"Relentlessly Mundane" is a good (if
depressing) take on the young people transported to a fantasy world
story.
If you've been reading George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire,
this looks very useful - summaries of all the
chapters of A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings, though
there's not yet anything up for
A Storm of
Swords.
I went home this weekend, as usual... Spent yesterday outside, in the sun,
moving things around and pounding on stuff. The sort of thing I think I need to
spend more time doing.
Saw Charlie's Angels last night. Probably should've waited
around for a quality film, but I have to admit that it was a guilty pleasure.
Mileage will, of course, vary, but I'd say it's worth a rental. Or, heck, if
nothing else is showing at ye olde mall multiplex, you could do far worse.
2000
November
5
:: write in the margins
Wednesday, November 1, 23:21 CST
Another month just rushed past...
I spent last night standing around in a well-heated house, wearing a fuzzy
hat and a heavy trench coat over a sweater.
Tonight, I sat on remarkably cold metal bleachers in a 30 mph wind wearing a
light jacket over a t-shirt for several hours, watching a football game.
Story of my life.
Got a
review of The Amber
Spyglass written. Can't say I'm all that happy with it, but it's there
- and hey, it serves its purpose well enough, I guess.
And I suppose I can always go back and revise it later... Or would that be
dishonest? Probably.
Speaking of reviews and suchlike, I think I should link to
Evelyn C. Leeper's page. Good stuff.
All original content on p1k3, unless otherwise noted, is
released to the public domain.