The Lamppost Island Dispatch

A Pint Of Life gives us, at last, the team-up between the Wonder Twins and Aquaman that we've all been waiting for.

( While it's nominally about the search for compatible blood donors actually it's just poking around in leftover Jungle Land background cels they had. )

Ultimately, then, it's kind of a disappointment, even with spectacle like Zan's rocket fantasy to stumble across.

Trivia: The United States Congress never determined who was the rightful discoverer of anaesthetic convincingly enough to award a $100,000 prize meant for it --- dentist Horace Wells, doctor William Morton, and professor Charles Jackson let matters too confused between them. Source: Radar, Hula Hoops, and Playful Pigs, Joe Schwarcz.

Currently Reading: Galahad at Blandings, P G Wodehouse.

( See under cut for full badge! )

Hope you like it, Onai! :)

Um, yeah. Friday. Shadake.

( game summary )

Just a couple more days until the end of the round and sign-ups close!

Here's who has yet to turn in:

bunny_hugger

tabenclearwater

onai_wolfwind

rizzy_rau

dingorama

Come on guys, get 'em in!

Just as a warning, 'I was busy with thanksgiving' won't be accepted as a valid extension excuse. Don't sign up for a month with a holiday in it if you're not going to do your badge before the holiday and know you're going to be busy for said holiday. The same goes for other holidays.

I did this for my first Nano to kind of cheat my way to the magical 50k. I've since removed it from the [to date] final draft--but not outright deleted it for what reason--because it seems to suffer from The Ring Syndrome (2002 release specifically) where the adaptation suffers* because the movie spells out why X, Y, and Z are scary/supposed to happen, when that destroys some of what makes X, Y, and Z scary in the first place [fear of the unknown and all that--oh, see what I did there?].
*arguably

I started an Author's Note for MLCS because it's more like Piers Anthony's notes than my abovementioned one did--it goes off in a different direction entirely and acknowledges that, while my idea is about as original as an idea can get, the prompt to get me to write about it was definitely inspired. I haven't decided if it will stay in the book, but it DOES help me get to 50k... 9_9

The best thing that ever happened to me regarding this story was having it rejected.

I started this as the first thing that came to mind for the Machine of Death (http://www.machineofdeath.net/) anthology contest. It was, needless to say, mediocre. Oddly enough, without reading anything else about the Machine of Death but the "list of things to avoid"/FAQ and the titles and some VERY abstract descriptions of the winning entries, I then knew what I was SUPPOSED to write. The story had a new life as MLCS, and Nano helped motivate me to write it out in the way it should have been written the first time. Nowadays, I realize it couldn't possibly have been written well for a short story—not by me, anyway—because there are just too many nuances that get lost in abbreviating it. I had far too much fun dragging everything out to really emphasize the torturous bits that somehow don't seem as bad when they're glossed over in the name of brevity.

I like to think I'm not entirely capitalizing on the Machine, though I'm sure there are some who would say I am. Well, the Machine answers the question of "how." MLCS answers "when." It's really a different animal, even if they're from the same genus and species. Okay, undeniably, I was inspired by the Machine, but the most I took from it was a general idea. Hopefully you can't deny me the privilege of running with an idea that wasn't being used.

The interesting part, which I unfortunately can't prove, is I had the general notion for MLCS well before I'd ever heard of the Machine, its editors, or their works. Hell, I'd barely heard of the Internet then—that's how old it is! It's something I'd always contemplated since the first time I'd heard about having a mid-life crisis: Do people actually have them mid-life, or are they more like three-fourths-life crises since many 'middle-aged' people don't live to see their golden years? What if it was possible to know, yes, half of your life is over now? Would it actually CAUSE people to have crises who didn't realize they were on a timetable before? It's sort of the same mental exercise executed with the Machine, just different parameters.

I also figured, hey, I'd better get MY version written before the Machine is actually published, or I REALLY might get accused of plagiarism.

I haven't figured out how to wrap it up yet, but hey--editing ¬_¬

Also, I've gotten to the point where MLCS is cemented as the sequel to B2S1 =/ in a very Howl's Moving Castle/Castle in the Air way. I was going to let the "ZOMG SPOILARZ DONT READ YUO GUYZ" get to me, but you know? People read books out of order all the damn time. Fuck it.

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回転寿司。。。＾o＾





L.L. Fish

mildly surprised I'd never seen this before today

--well, there IS rice in it...?

Tysons II is pretty... that's about it =p

Today it was sunny and the air was chilly. When I got off work it promptly sleeted so I shrugged off the offense with pho. I survived and I have strep throat (thank you for the well wishes!).

But that's okay because look at this gold mine of reference:



The internet is a bountiful resource and all you have to do is stumble around. It just falls into your lap. I nearly dread removing its influence, but I'm also terribly curious on the effects. The hardest thing about packing for a journey is that you never know what you'll really need (and in the end, you didn't need any of it anyways).


The line that brightened my entire day (after promptly passing out in exhaustion) was stumbling on this: "Khan punishes Crabb by assigning him to be a chef for a band of Acrocanthosaurus Shaolin-monks"

Acrocanthosaurus Shaolin-monks guys. Word combination mental fuel.

PS: The floor is made of lava.

Enough Aquaman for the moment. Let's get back to real proper Superfriends antics with The Revenge Of Doom:

( As you might expect, the Legion of Doom tries to conquer the world, and it involves ray guns, man-sized test tubes, and hugging Robin.  )

So it's got a lot of what was cool about Challenge of the Superfriends but condensed almost to the point the audience barely knows what hit them. There are things to be said either way for this.

Trivia: Coal was taxed in 1667 by the City of London at one shilling per ton. This was tripled in 1670. Source: London: A History, A N Wilson.

Currently Reading: Galahad at Blandings, P G Wodehouse.

Oh, Tim.

Oh, Tim, you've destroyed me.

Young Beatle-wigged bespectacled "S." Baldrick, you've destroyed me, too.

I never heard it before today, and now it won't leave my head.

One of my sisters is (a) former military, and (b) some sort of super-soldier with an overclocked brain. She's also crazy and in prison but that's not the point. The point is that I must have been out of my mind to agree to do PvP duels with her.

I won the first two games, because I knew the system and she didn't yet, which kind of helped make up for things. But then she learned the system. And started programming custom spells -- so I was the one with no idea what was happening, in addition to being the one who was thinking really slowly and didn't have administrator access to the server to approve non-standard constructs.

Oh, and I guess I won that one a while later where I turned into an electric porcupine and she accidentally impaled herself on my invisible spines. Of course by the very next game she was already using that trick against me in ways I'd never even dreamed of...

Not to mention that she had the pain setting turned all the way up to 11 on the sim. Who does that?! She turned it down when I complained though.

After she got bored of killing me in all sort of horrifically clever ways, she offered to teach me to fight. v.v I might take her up on it, although not because I really want to fight -- I got sucked into the whole 'glowbug' thing and getting tutored by one of the original glowbugs isn't really something to pass up. I'd get a *lot* of flack from Bluejay if I turned her down.

Plus, when she breaks out of prison and comes to kill me, maybe I'll be able to hold her off long enough to get Epoch to safety. ,,,o.o,,,

previous entry

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1 | 2 | 3 | Familiar, chapter 4

Previous stories in this universe are Space Otters:
http://terrycloth.livejournal.com/540642.html

and Glow Bugs:
http://terrycloth.livejournal.com/581586.html

Dramatis Personae (not updated for this story yet):
http://terrycloth.livejournal.com/576866.html

I did not, in fact, gorge--though I did get sleepy, so either I gorged and didn't feel it, or I'm still narcoleptic.

Nano yay.

I made this


This factoid got a LOT of use this week: Will Ferrell is the most overpaid actor.

For every dollar Ferrell was paid, his films earned an average $3.29. Compare that to Shia LaBeouf, who topped our list of Best Actors for the Buck in August. For every dollar LaBeouf was paid, his films earned an average $160.

This didn't stop Dan from putting Step Brothers on 9_9 [At least I see the humour, vs. shit like Epic Movie--or, "dumb jokes that are funny" vs. "I feel stupider for having seen that"...]

Angels & Demons is out on DVD/etc. now. I've been wondering how much that brought Ewan McGregor down to make him the second-most overpaid actor =p

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

So you've got an exam to prepare for? How you prepare is depends on many things, mostly whether you're giving or taking it. If you are taking the exam be courteous and don't take two or more, unless there are enough to go around. If you're giving the exam then have a couple of extras so the photocopier can produce a few blurry copies with page three missing and page five stapled to something completely inappropriate, such as an early map of the gold fields of California or a teaching assistant, which makes it (not the teaching assistant) happy. If you lack a teaching assistant try stapling them to a field guide to steam locomotives, an attractive but uninformative copy of which may be found in the Attractive But Uninformative Books To Give As Gifts table in the bookstore.

Let's get back to thinking what you'd do if you're giving the exam, and you should really look this up before you get your preparations under way, since the next thing you have to do after deciding you really want to give one is learn what your subject is. There are some subjects that are much better as exam material than others. For example, Contemporary South Asian Art is a great subject to give an exam in.

You can ask all kinds of questions about what the art is, or who committed the feat of art, or how it was received, and whether it was received with an appreciative comment or if it was clearly just a quick acknowledgement and attempt to change the subject, and whether it meets the important qualifications of art like can it be used as the decorative pattern on the backs of mass transit system fare cards and so on. You can fill an exam's worth of questions before you even get into the big things like ``What is Asia?'' and ``Are we sure we know what we mean by South just yet?''. (No.)

Now compare that to when you have a tough subject, like Coffee Cups. There's almost nothing you can ask there. You can show a student an object and put out the question: Is This A Coffee Cup? (A) Yes, (B) No, (C) All of the above, (D) There is insufficient information to answer this question, (E) I'm thirsty. There's nowhere to go from there, and even when you're there you aren't much of anywhere. If you're giving the exam to upper-level undergraduates or maybe Masters' students you can try essay questions about whether something is a coffee cup if it's only ever used for tea, and how things change if you brew the tea in coffee rather than water, but what are the odds you're teaching an advanced course in Coffee Cups? Exactly. The notion is silly and I'm sorry to waste your time with it.

Much more probable is that you're preparing an exam in Socks, since you can there ask questions like: Is This A Pair Of Socks? using the same set of answers as above for the multiple-choice portion. It also leads to a natural essay question in that you can ask people who've chosen ``I'm thirsty'' as a response to the sock identification question just why they're thirsty. Is it the result of some sock-related incident? Have they possibly got a sock stuffed in their mouths right now? I mean each of them has one sock and one mouth per person, though advanced students might have multiple socks stuffed in there. Why are the socks there? Is it an attempt to keep them silent during their kidnapping? If it is should we contact responsible authorities, and maybe campus security too?

Now you see how fortunate you are? By having the exam in the correct subject area (Socks, not Coffee Cups) you've managed to detect and maybe even foil a serious crime. So you've earned the gratitude of the would-be victim, the family, and maybe even got a write-up in the student newspaper where they'll spell your name in an innovative new way.

The only downside to giving the exams is you'll also have to get them graded. Try a rock tumbler.

Trivia: Daniel Defoe asserted that the great storm of 27 November 1703 was the same one which had been felt in America several days earlier. Source: A History of the United States Weather Bureau, Donald R Whitnah.

Currently Reading: McKinley, Bryan, and the People, Paul W Glad.

Oh right, so, here I am at home now! (Heh, been home a few hours now.) The drive home from Denton was pretty much totally uneventful. Beautiful cloudless sky, a few pit stops, singing along with mix CDs... nothing to speak of, except to say that it's amazing how much flavor a sandwich can lose overnight in a fridge, even when sealed up in a Ziploc bag.

I just have to record this somewhere.

The sky here is overcast, there is a lot of mist in the air. Not quite fog, but it feels like a cloud is hugging the ground.

On the drive back to my house we saw a red glow on the horizon, above the treeline. It looked surreal and unnatural. We soon realized the glow was caused by brake lights, the sheer amount of vehicles turning the sky red. Vehicles waiting for tomorrow.

In five hours I head to work and there is nothing about tomorrow I am looking forward to, except perhaps leaving. Because as added insult, I also work the Saturday nightmare. But enough bitching. For those of you also having to work in retail, stay strong.

Mom and I had a decent Thanksgiving. I made my shepherds pie or whatever you want to call it; a cream of mushroom base with tons of vegetables topped with a biscuit crust. Mom made a tofu casserole that was quite good, and we finished with a fruit salad.

I took Mom to see Fantastic Mr. Fox, which, although good, was not quite the phenomenon people have been hyping it to be. I took a shine to the quirky style: the yellow Helvetica captions at the top of the screen, blanking out cuss words appropriately with the word "cuss," the moments when it suddenly resembled cutout animation, and the inexplicable outfits that some of the characters wore. (There's a badger kid who wears a skeleton outfit throughout the whole movie, and it's never explained.) More substantively, it's a decent story, not cut and dried with its characterizations or dialogue. Ash's imperfections make him endearing, and Mr. Fox's blithe carelessness is charming, though I think I'm less certain of the film's attempt to whitewash his wife's tolerance for it.

It's pretty much in the spirit of Dahl, outside of the Hollywood-necessary American accents of the heroes. The British should have just gotten pissy and overdubbed the American actors with British ones and made the villains American, but whatever.

A few amusing moments:

1) Owen Wilson gets credit above the title, and he's in the thing for all of two minutes.

2) "Kristofferson" becomes a really clunky name to repeat. However, he does qualify as my favorite character of the movie.

3) Apparently Katharine Hepburn didn't die; she married an angry apple farmer.

4) I must be a furry, because ( (Spoiler, yay.) )

Anyway... let's quickly get on to what I'm thankful for:

Mom's alive, I have wonderful fans and friends, and there's still good music out there. That's a good start.

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

Good news, everyone: it's an Aquaman episode! On to Terror On The Titanic:

( It's important to remember these were the days before the Titanic's remains had been found by Michel and Ballard through the ingenious process of going to where it had sunk and looking.  )

Still, I like it a good deal. It feels like there's a decent monster movie struggling to get out of here, and that all the important things can be wrapped up in seven minutes shows the dramatic economy that the Superfriends feature at their best.

Trivia: The blizzard of 26 November 1898 forced the Baltimore Country Club to cancel a tornament which had invited golfers from 125 clubs across the nation. Source: 1898: The Birth Of The American Century, David Traxel.

Currently Reading: McKinley, Bryan, and the People, Paul W Glad.

Just got back from seeing Fantastic Mr. Fox, as it finally hit wide release. Furry movie of the decade, certainly. As I suspected, it takes the form of a grown-up caper film, or a reverent parody thereof. It takes the attitude, which we've seen bright flashes of before in Aardman features, of "Oh, go ahead and call it a kid's film if you must, but we are doing this because we cussing love animation and we are going to do something real with it." And pushes it a step further.

And, goodness, the animation. It seemed rough to me in the trailers, but in context, it is amazingly rich with detail. You can forget you're not watching living talking critters, and at the same time, you are never allowed to forget how much work went into every stitch and stone.

The glory of it, though, is that it deconstructs everything. It's way ahead of your silly little questions about why these supposedly wild animals have markets and newspapers and real estate agencies, and why they can talk with humans but dogs are just dogs, and why does George Clooney always have to go back for one last big score, anyway?*... Instead of answers, you get "Oho, you think that doesn't make sense? Try this! It totally doesn't make sense! You'd better just follow the plot because there is way more where that came from. We have lots and lots of lampshades, and we are going to make places to hang them all." And by gosh, it works.

*Actually, they did feel compelled to explain that last one. It was overdue to be addressed by someone, and they stepped up.