The Lamppost Island Dispatch

This is what I said in August of 2005:

1. Genesis, "Fading Lights"
2. Jethro Tull, "Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day"
3. The Moody Blues, "I'm Just a Singer in a Rock and Roll Band"
4. The Beatles, "Revolution"
5. Pink Floyd, "The Final Cut"
6. Queen, "These Are the Days of Our Lives"
7. Porcupine Tree, "Arriving Somewhere But Not Here"
8. Nirvana, "All Apologies"
9. Mike and the Mechanics, "Before the Next Heartache Falls"
10. Rainbow, "Sensitive to Light"

I think that list needs a little revising:

1. Genesis, "Fading Lights" (this'll probably never change)
2. Jethro Tull, "Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day"
3. The Beatles, "Revolution"
4. Queen/David Bowie, "Under Pressure"
5. IQ, "You Never Will"
6. The Moody Blues, "I'm Just a Singer in a Rock and Roll Band"
7. Pendragon, "The Freak Show"
8. Queen, "These Are The Days of Our Lives"
9. John Lennon, "Imagine"
10. Tears For Fears, "Sowing the Seeds of Love"

Subject to change again, but I figured IQ and TFF deserved places considering those songs' staying power in my playlists.

I've blogged excessively about "Fading Lights,"* but it really is a marvelous song. The words hit home deeply, and the instrumental section moves me to tears while at the same time pumping me up. It was a brilliant way for Genesis to leave the Phil Collins era. (They went and made another album with Ray Wilson that I like, though, so it wasn't entirely over.)

(*That entry bothers me now. Oh well.)

Friday night, we played some Shadake. Probably for the last time this year. Thank you Christmas! q:3

( game summary )

Why is it conservative religious groups always get traction with, "I don't want my tax dollars to pay for abortion," but atheists never get traction with, "I don't want my tax dollars to go to religious organizations"? The health care legislation is getting jerked around because some people don't think it restricts abortion enough, but we still end up subsidizing intolerant religious groups via faith-based initiatives.

We got our first snow for the season today. The forecast had been coming in for a couple days, for something Saturday night to Sunday morning, and I figured it would be like most first-snows or for that matter average storms, namely, maybe a couple inches faintly attractive and really built up to way beyond what the storm deserves by the local TV news, which has discovered that people will respond to news of Storm Alerts without the jaded indifference that every other bit of what's passed for news on TV gets anymore. They'll wear down interest in storms, I'm sure, someday, and can't wait for it.

Anyway, since I was expecting a post-midnight flurry I was a little put off to rise early Saturday afternoon and find snow covering the back yard. It wasn't much cover, and grass was still visible, but it still suggested that the ``time tracking'' of the forecasts --- which at 8 am yesterday forecast nothing, at 2 pm forecast a quarter-inch, and by 8 pm were forecasting two inches, implying that by 2 am they were forecasting an infinite amount of snow --- might be on to something. My parents arrived home moments later, with fresh bundles of groceries, since there were four or five cubic inches of space in the freezer, and my mother gave an exceedingly detailed report on just where the roads were tolerable, where they were mushy, and where they were impassible (right where we live), but if I wanted to go Christmas shopping, all right.

I did go out. I had to mail cards, for one, and to get some presents for the tougher-to-shop-for relatives, and I like doing a bit of puttering around on the weekends, particularly since I went into work on Friday so missed that as a day off. It wasn't a heavy storm, really, but it was coming down pretty steadily and continuously and after the Post Office, and then Best Buy, and a short visit to K-Mart I realized the roads were too slushy, and the sky too dark, and the visibility too low --- I could see the world vanishing into grey, as if it were ending, and this on the US Route --- to carry on.

Trivia: Contemporary estimates of the money Argentina's Juan Péron spent on Ronald Richter's Huemel Island fusion reactor in 1951 ranged between $3.7 million and $70 million. Source: Sun In A Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking, Charles Seife.

Currently Reading: Outliers: The Story Of Success, Malcolm Gladwell. If this is representative of his writing I can see why he's a bestselling author: it nearly feels chocked full of insight and information while staying extremely breezy a read. I must figure out how it's done before starting work on my own bestselling pop sci book.

Purely(?) for purposes of research: Say your friend discovered a significant piece of his/her history, like an old photo, book, or recording of a deceased family member. Friend shows it to you, and you like it. Would you feel comfortable asking for a copy, or would you feel it isn't your place to ask?


I am increasingly aware of my age, most specifically in the fact that one of my gums has eroded significantly from a front tooth--most distressing because I understand that gums don't grow back =( I think we're to the point where grafting could be done should it become necessary, but it would definitely cost more than I'd be comfortable paying... ugh >_<

I alternate between struggling desperately to get my message out, to warn foster mini-mes of the danger of failing to pay attention to one's station in life, and of resignation, that 'well, if I didn't pay attention, mini-mes certainly won't' state I mentioned in my last post. Some things just have to be experienced to understand [I didn't comprehend cavities until I had like six].

BLARGH SNOWWWWW DX

I always wondered what people were talking about when they said pods were the worst invention since the internet, but now that I've tried one...

Basically, in case you're not from an arcology, a pod is a, um, pod. That you go in. And play a sim. For as long as you want -- years, decades, your whole life -- the pod keeps you alive and healthy. Since most of the people in the arcology don't get posh luxury suites with holograms and repulsors and a decent amount of square footage, it's a really tempting option.

Waking up from a pod sucks, though. You're not hibernating, so you just get really, really stiff. And I was only in one for three days! I bet humans who come out after even a month or two need a session with an autodoc.

I hear that's one of the advantages ratlings have -- they're the new race optimized for arcology life. Among other things, they're supposed to be able to pod for years and wake up good as new. They're a new race, though, so most of them are still kids -- we'll see how well that holds up when they get older.

last entry

---

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | Familiar, chapter 7

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:
http://terrycloth.livejournal.com/576866.html

The Plutonium Finishing Plant at Hanford, Washington, where plutonium was once machined and stored, is now cleared of high security materials and ready for demolition. During the Cold War about two thirds of the plutonium used in the U.S. nuclear weapons program passed through that building. (I'm pretty sure the Google Maps location shown is incorrect; the finishing plant would have actually been inside the Hanford Reservation.)

A side note: The B Reactor at Hanford, where plutonium was produced for the Trinity tests and the "Fat Man" bomb dropped over Nagasaki, is open for public tours during the summer months. This was the world's first industrial-scale nuclear reactor; Enrico Fermi personally supervised its initial start-up. If you ever get the chance to see it I highly recommend going, especially since it could eventually be demolished and the core cocooned (as has been done with the C, D, and F reactors) if funding for its preservation runs out.

YAY Kat finally looks correct! =D [...under the gaudy clothes...]



edit: Ooo, it self-updates now! That's... kind of annoying, actually, but useful.

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

Day 3 without proper apartment heat. My space heater is keeping this room comfortable, but when I have to venture out to the kitchen or bathroom it's 55°F. Can't say I find the snowstorm as charming as I should.

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

I've been off this week, and playing a lot of Torchlight. I got my third character (the fighter type) almost to the end of the game (I *think* -- to the 'black citadel' levels or whatever) when, sometime today, it decided it wanted to patch for the new 'steam cloud' feature that I have absolutely no use for.

It patched my game into the demo version. I can't access any of my characters, or get a new character any farther than the first boss battle. What the fuck?

I also decided I wanted to try out 'Jade Empire', another game by the same company that made Perfect World and Ether Saga, so I went to log in... nope. Okay, let's try another password... nope. Did I get the username wrong? Oh heck, I'll just reset my password to something stupidly simple. As a bonus, it told me my username. Yay!

Nope. Still can't log in. What... the... fuck.

--shit, SNOW means likely Christmas when we go back to PA to look for my boxes. Ugh, delays! X/ Good thing it's not particularly time-sensitive...

I've found it nigh-unavoidable to put recurring themes into my work. Part of it is writing what I know or like vs. trying [and failing] to convincingly extrapolate details about something with which I am only fleetingly familiar. Part of it is the feeling that history HAS to repeat itself to a degree--I'm cynical but convinced that every high school must have a fatal accident involving one or more of its student body at least once every few years to remind the rest of the very real dangers of driving [do you believe the stove is hot until you burn yourself on it? ...same thing].

Most of it is laziness, maybe =/ but in most cases I can't think of a better way to write something different just for the sake of not recycling! If a love story works once, switching out the characters can still work--it's not an INSTANT cliché when the "cliché" still does the job [read: trope].

This is something even people only casually acquainted with my work may notice if prompted: All of my major characters save one have either one or both parents dead, missing, or otherwise out of the picture for the duration of their active narrative. [The one pretty much HAD to be normal--I couldn't write an ENTIRE universe of people reproducing and then never staying paired, could I?]

Why? --it's more interesting, if not outright MAUDLIN.

The prior link is why I can't read The Washington Post's website at work: 1. It's one of those websites that has some arbitrary bit of code or other that causes MS Office to try to install something that it can't because I don't have the CD or administrative access X/ [drives me crazy] and 2. I can't read it without wanting to cry. I'm not big on WANTING to cry like girlier girls who watch crappy sappy romance movies [*cough*Titanic*cough*], but real life heartbreak is harder to dismiss and makes me have to concede, OKAY YES, there beats a heart within my chest D..=

...*gag*

But... back to the subject. I--and, no doubt, most authors of any merit--find it difficult to write a good story when the main characters are tied down by the reins of TEH PARENTS. Adventure stories in particular suffer the most, because the presence of a stable parenthood by definition is the exact opposite of what the child perceives as adventure. Unless the story is specifically ABOUT parental reins--or is Calvin and Hobbes--parental reining only serves to limit the options for the child acting independently while still being a dependent. It's also not that convincing when, say, an angsty teenage feudal lord goes on a far-reaching quest to find... the guy who snubbed his father at a luncheon once. I mean, what the hell |:p

As I mentioned somewhere before I don't feel like digging up, stories are about trouble, anyway, so having the absent parent(s) just gets that much more of a head start =) It's NOT that I'm writing out my own parents' departures from this plane* as part of a long therapeutic process to work through my trauma or that I secretly want them gone or anything awful like that. It just works better as a story 9_9 while real life is happily boring ^.^
*--which haven't happened yet, no


Happy Self-Anniversary XD to jenova_silver and terrymouse! There will be a HOPEFULLY Giftmas package on the way for Mouse shortly, could have been earlier but I forgot to write down which was what we were getting... oops ¬_¬; Better than the wrong thing, tho, innit?

Also, we blew several hours on these guys' Ustream. Ah, if you didn't hear the Naughty Letters to Santa... wow. ::T_T:: I have no idea if they'll leave that in when they repost it...? IF they repost it? Hrm.

We actually drove back to our hotel, the overflow one, in order that we could ride the shuttle bus intended to run every half-hour between the overflow hotel and the con hotel. Since we had bunny_hugger's car maybe we didn't need to do this, but it would avoid any problems in finding parking spaces, and while skylerbunny expressed skepticism about the schedule of the shuttle it seemed to work by my clock. As we set out, I found my electric toothbrush had decided it should just start running and keep running until I hit it. And I decided to leave my jacket at the hotel since, after all, I was going to be indoors except for the very brief times going from shuttle to hotel room and what would I need a jacket for that for?

( So there was checking in, and getting our bearings, mostly, not to mention just settling generally in. )

One other thing we'd need to get to, and that I felt a bit of anxiety about, was finally meeting in person bluerain --- with whom I've had a fairly tumultuous relationship --- and orv --- whom I've known longer and much more peacefully --- and augustforth --- whom I've known a long while although not truly intimately --- and kevinjdog --- whom, well, I suppose I can count as acquaintance. My experience usually has been that people are easier to know in person than online, but, I can't say that's based on a statistically significant sample. Anything might happen.

Trivia: Apollo 17's Command Module splashed down 19 December 1972 1.0 nautical miles from its designated target, and 3.5 nautical miles from its recovery ship. Source: Apollo By The Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-2000-4029.

Currently Reading: But Didn't We Have Fun? An Informal History Of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843 - 1870, Peter Morris.

Right. Sunday, we played some D+D at Tom's place, and I forgot to write it up. Until now!

( game summary )

The answer to all your questions is, never mind, I'm tired of pumpkin pie for the rest of the year anyway. :}

Also, hey lookit my "Disney TFs" icon! I added a third frame!

``Only in the movies'' came the warning atop the title card, which was a relief. I wouldn't be responsible for whatever would follow. What would be described ought to happen only in a movie, or in front of a movie camera operated by movie people making a movie. While I was at a movie, I wasn't in a movie, so I was free to act in ways not specified. Plus I wasn't quite at a movie since the movie hadn't started. I figured I was safe. I have these outbursts of optimism.

``Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary'', came the text, ``people in movies think that trying on hats is fun.'' And now I was stuck. I don't habitually wear hats, what with it being after 1962's discovery by the ``long-haired'' Beatles that males could have hair extruded a whole inch from the skin without heads bursting into flame or whatever the problem with long hair was. But the habit of hat not-wearing means I have a habit of hat not-trying-on. I can document three instances of me hat-trying, but this can't be called a habit, and neither can the hats, so don't think I didn't have that one in mind, since I didn't, and can't explain its presence. Please treat it as a hallucination until a proper cover story can be written.

Still: if there's fun to be had trying on hats, then why wasn't I having it? But if there's not any fun to be had trying on hats, I wouldn't be missing out on anything if I didn't try on hats, unless I have that the wrong way around, and what if I never found out that I didn't?

The first question: how much does it take to make a mountain of evidence? Well, a mountain, certainly, although right away we're in trouble since there's such a range of mountains. (I'm leaving that phrase for potential future development.) Mountains can be found worldwide, from Himalaya through to the Dust-Covered Cheap Toys And Small Mountains aisle in the typical convenience store, between off-brand Rubik's Cubes and keychain Etch-A-Sketches. Well, a mountain is evidence for a mountain, so we can start out writing ``one mountain = a mountain'' on a clean sheet of mountain-evidence paper.

Then take any other mountain, which is just one mountain as well, unless it's several mountains. If it's several mountains peel one off and leave the rest for later. Since this is a mountain again, we have a second mountain equal to the first through their both being a mountain. So happily we don't have to worry which mountain we're trying to assemble into evidence; we can take the first one that we reach. Let's hope it's a small one.

But all this reasoning doesn't tell us how many hats amount to one mountain, or how to translate evidence of hat-trying to evidence of mountain-being. Sure, a hat is a hat-sized piece of evidence and we can see how many hats build into a mountain by volume, but how about by fun? And there are levels of fun. Trying on a straw boater is more fun than trying a beaver hat, just from time saved not recovering from angry beaver clawings.

But top hats beat both, especially top hats from cartoons that keep popping up and down. Top hats also beat chef hats, since in a chef hat a series of comic misunderstandings is bound to leave you stuck in the kitchen responsible all evening for spelling ``béarnaise sauce''. More fun than all those are tricornes, which you can't start trying on without wild adventures putting you in the Vaguely 18th century or becoming a Lord Mayor.

Thinking isn't helping, so let's go to the hat store and ask the first person who comes out, ``How many hats would you have to try on to have as much fun as you have evidence for a mountain?''

He pauses, and says, ``I've never seen a mountain. But it's 3,410 hats to one lacustrine plain, if that helps.''

``It does indeed, thank you,'' and now we know better.

Trivia: Harry S Truman's ``gents furnishings'' store, Truman & Jacobson, opened in November 1919 with an inventory valued at about $35,000, of which Truman put up $15,000. Source: Truman, David McCullough.

Currently Reading: But Didn't We Have Fun? An Informal History Of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843 - 1870, Peter Morris.

You don't drink, don't smoke - what do you do? You don't drink, don't smoke - what do you do? Subtle innuendos follow, There must be something inside...

[drawn in the front cover of my EotM notepad during a lull at work when I realized we weren't being supervised... =B DURP]

[[gad, I could almost make a portfolio from all the scenes coming to mind, 'cept I don't know if anyone would buy it out of context... also, want to finish BOOK COVER FIRST AAGH]]

[[[P.S. Does anyone want coupons for LJ paid time discounts to upgrade from basic/plus? I kind of figure anyone who would pay for an account has already, but lemme know.]]]

--okay, I'll break out of the brackets =p This is what I don't get about people who get uppity about "Happy Holidays" vs. "Merry Christmas"--why are you fighting so hard to get unbelievers to do your job for you? I'm not remotely a practicing Christian, but I can totally get behind the Advent Conspiracy =) though I still can't completely get behind even a great religious figure getting to celebrate His birthday for a solid twelfth or more of the year [arguably, three months before His REAL birthday as well].

D'ya ever feel the whole world is a Spielberg Production and you are a Alan Smithy release?

The Holidays do that to me. All the glitz, lights, excitement are all around. For me . . . I think I am infected by several diseases of the time . . . they all contribute to those feelings.

1. "Lackofmoneyitis" I think all of us end up with this from time to time, but can be aggravated by having another malaise with it.

2. "Practicalitis" Along with Lackofmoneyitis it can really affect holidays. Being practical can really kill things and it provides wonderful excuses for not doing things everyone would consider Holiday behavior.

3. Laziness. That speaks for itself. . . .

I used to celebrate holidays in a big way . . . lotsa lights, tree, trips, shopping, presents . . . then I moved out of my parents' house.

That's when the infections got serious . . . Bleah!