Assorted, including the Tricky Pixie concert on the 26th (glee!!)

( Reasonably tasty food, badly behaved equipment. )

Concert was good, though. Am suddenly and madly in audience-to-performer love with Alexander James Adams; did not actually buy the duet-with-Heather Alexander album, but it is on my List. "He of the Sidhe" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR6Dl3LoxJU (which was presented without the same introduction, but the lyrics did enough with the context) did not quite make the tears spill over, but it was close. "Creature" ... ohhhh yeah. SEX IN BOOTS. Also the Beltane fire song. <3

1:53 AM 2/27/2010
It did me good to hear some good old-fashioned pagan music. My life needs more of that.

2:01 AM 2/27/2010
Hilariously, the Tantus Vamp came up in pre-song patter for a werewolf song.

Drew a Ravens In The Library sketch, because my mind very clearly saw all the havoc.

2:11 AM 2/27/2010
I suddenly find myself in need of a userpic from the cover of The Rowan, for use regarding psychic powers, the relevant era of my life, and that particular avenue of fashion choice.

8:14 AM 2/27/2010
My cellphone makes a cute little chime when unplugged or plugged in. So very charming to hear it when I'm on the other side of the room. (Hi, California unstable power. Nice to meet you.)

I have an abundance of cat-5. In the absence of the wirelessness of my cablemodem/wireless router behaving properly this morning, I have broken out some of it.

8:18 AM 2/27/2010
If someone has said a hilarious but slightly awkward turn of phrase to me once, I may wrap my brain's tentacles around it and never let it go. I list "imperfect English" as an interest for a reason. It is an interest, and not just a like: sometimes the crazy things people say make me run and hide, but nevertheless I can often figure out what was trying to be conveyed. My brain spins on "why on Earth" and "what the fuck".

( Read more... )

2:02 AM 2/28/2010

I have a bad habit of answering questions of the form "How did X happen?", "How do you do X?" or "How did it get to be X?" with "Carefully." -- even when this makes absolutely no sense.

Makes sense:
"How do you get an iguana into your carry-on baggage, anyway?"
"Carefully."

Does not make sense:
"How did it get to be 2 in the morning?"
"Carefully."

This does not stop me from thinking it is hilarious.

3:13 AM 2/28/2010
"...WEARING CLOTHES, OKAY?" Depression is hard. Disability is hard. Other assorted things can be hard. Sometimes, I'M WEARING CLOTHES, OKAY!? is what one has got. They are clothes. My face may not look like I want to talk to humans, I may have no lipstick and my Impossible Hair may have decided to colonize its immediate surroundings, but I'M WEARING CLOTHES. WHAT THE HELL ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO ASK FOR. (Shorthand between me and MissKat for those scenarios where, well. WEARING CLOTHES.) Useful for one's own self, and one's expectations of others. ("Yes, he has no sense of style and his sweatpants are backwards, BUT HE IS WEARING CLOTHES, OKAY?")

9:58 AM 2/28/2010
(from a comment elsejournal, a realization:) A worldview with "X is the Right Thing and cannot be wrong, and if signs of damage are present and correlated with X, well, that means we are just not doing X enough/hard enough/long enough" is pathological. One must at least, if X is correlated with damage, examine the premise that perhaps X is the wrong thing, or being applied incorrectly, in this particular case, even if that premise is later rejected. (Inhaling the cough syrup does not help, in other words, and g-d help you if you have an allergy.)

5:58 PM 2/28/2010
Best friend was at D&D game when I called earlier, and apparently had not taken over the world with a zombie army, or some such thing. The peanut gallery (the other gamers) had commentary, in the form of "Today! He hasn't done that *today*!" Ahh, my dear sweet fiendishly-scheming best friend. :D

( Juicy mediumish steak. )

Book: Boneshaker

(The icon would probably be appreciated by any number of the book's characters, rather than being commentary on the book itself.)

Finished reading cmpriest's Boneshaker earlier. Now that's an effective use of viewpoint-protagonist-not-telling-us-everything, masterfully done. (I speak, of course, of ( spoiler )

not sharing the full details of ( spoiler )

until the very end. It's not some piddly little detail; it's IMPORTANT, and it's also the sort of thing that one might not allow one's mind to dwell on, and it's also the sort of thing best served up with proof. Read and learn, young writers.)

For those who haven't read Boneshaker, I have a few questions.
1) Do you like alternate histories?
2) Do you like steampunk? Particularly, steampunk of the sort that doesn't try to hide the grime and the fact that the times we're speaking of were horribly racist and their alternate versions would likely not be much better? (I felt that there was a decent balance of not-making-the-modern-reader-cringe-too-badly, showing how it surely would have been based on how it was, and showing that the modern author did not approve. Though I'm not sensitized to these things; YMMV particularly if you are.)
3) Would you like to poke about an alternate Seattle that had become a Gold Rush boomtown? Would you mind it horribly if Seattle got slightly destroyed?
4) What are your thoughts on zombies?
5) Are you willing to accept the premise of the ( Blight )

? Without expecting to know its exact chemical nature or why it has the horrid effects it has? (Chemistry folks may have to suspend some serious disbelief.)

Two stories interlock throughout the book. Zeke Wilkes struggles to come of age and redeem the name of his reviled father. Meanwhile, Briar Wilkes fights tooth and nail against any force of man, nature, or the unnatural that gets in her way in order to find her son and keep him from getting his fool self killed ... or worse. The story is framed with an investigative reporter/historian who just wants to know the truth, honest.

One of the other reviews out there sums it up as basically an action movie (steampunk plus zombies) in book form, with some dangling ends, insufficiently explored motivations, and not overmuch suspense due to the interlocking plot threads. I can't disagree, and some more attention to those things would have been nice. Good thing both that other reviewer and I like action movies! I'll be re-reading this one.

(It also leaves the door wide open for a sequel; I would dearly love to hear about the continued adventures of ( spoiler )

. And I'm happy to see that my instincts for these things are not leading me false: there seem to be more planned, though I've no idea what they'll actually explore.)

Ворон

In a comment buried deep somewhere in Suggestions, someone said that they weren't likely to learn to read Russian even with continuous exposure.

I find that attitude puzzling. For, it is with continued exposure that I've started being able to read-by-sight (though I doubt I'd recognize the first word spoken) things like Вопрос, спам, статус, and Кэрри. My learning takes phases. Sometimes it's active, and I seek out alphabet videos (still in Kindergarten, really). Sometimes it's passive, and I just run yet another suggestion in my queue (or request in my category) through the translator, taking the time to look at the words that don't translate and see if I can translate any of them from letters or context or both. (Often as not they're loan-words picked up from English technical and LiveJournal-technical language, with some peculiarly Russian-grammatical morphing, and thus I give back although the rest of it doesn't compute on its own.)

Raven had a great deal to do with the way my mind is wired. I pick up the shiny things, see, and words have always counted. (Ворон, my brain says helpfully. "Вор means 'thief'." Thief-bird. And now I realize that characterizing Piotr's contemporaries descending for the funeral as a bunch of flapping black ravens is perhaps a horrible, horrible pun.)

Perhaps I will never reach even an elementary level of comprehension, much less attain fluency, but I'm hardly going to attempt to stop my brain from investigating and picking up words and rehearsing them at night so I can see it in big glowing letters behind closed eyelids, shape of the word, letters of the word, pronunciation of the word, meaning of the word, and some bastard etymology to boot, all in one concerted little struggle.

18 tweets for 2010-3-1

In the last 24 hours, I posted the following to Twitter:

• Monday, 0026: @fairlight777 Happy Birthday!
• Monday, 0027: @fairlight777 Yes, but it's not like not having a penis. If you don't have a penis, or easy access to someone else's, you're out of luck.
• Monday, 0027: @fairlight777 If you have a butt, lube, privacy, and running water, you are all set for learning about buttsex.
• Monday, 0030: @fairlight777 Though one can always read about the research others have done on the topic of operating/owning/being owned by a penis.
• Monday, 0104: @demonicerrantry Gander, goose.
( read the other 13 )

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