Words are inadequate

Friday night I put a large number of things in a slightly less large number of boxes. Satyrday, tripped down to Bellingham with uilos and culfinriel. Spent around $80 on the USPS because even with the car rental it's cheaper than shipping through Canada Post. Faster and less US Customs-intensive, too.

Bellingham has a new "game store." Disappointingly, it's actually a Warhammer / Warmachine store with a bunch of Magic cards and two shelves of boardgames. So that took about five minutes to peruse. On the other hand, Mallard's is currently serving frankincense ice cream (ETA: recipe courtesy thanate), which may be the best ice cream I've ever had. (The pomegranate sorbet from Moorenko's is disqualified on the shaky grounds that it's a sorbet, not an ice cream.) And the dueling used bookstores remain fine places to find any number of things. One, for instance, has volumes two through four of Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet, which I've heard a couple of people say nice things about and which I have resisted picking up because, hello, volumes two through four are of little use to me. I did pick up a(nother) giftable copy of JMF's Growing Up Weightless, because it's one of those books (along with The Dragon Waiting, and The Last Hot Time, and Heat of Fusion if I ever saw that in the wild) that I buy on spec because surely I know someone who needs it, and because I adore the cover. (Of which there is not a satisfactory image online, because much of what I adore is only visible in the wraparound.)

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Since then I have been fairly brain-dead. Not sleeping well has been part of it; not sure about the rest, if there even is anything that's "rest." I did have a lovely evening last night with a handful of people I'd mostly never met before, at a small local poly meet... thing. The jury is still out but it may be the type of thing I'm looking for.

Also, as of season 4, Battlestar Galactica has gone so far off the rails that it can no longer see the rails from where it is, and in fact retains only a dim memory that once there were rails for it to go off of. Or, to quote Douglas Adams, "I think this is getting needlessly messianic."

... and we just had five minutes of snow hail downtown. All melted now of course, but still nice to see.

Charity auction of several John M. Ford books, including the alternate-Borderlands novel The Last Hot Time and both of his fantastic story+poetry collections. (Noted here primarily for rbandrews, because it includes From The End Of The Twentieth Century, which includes "To The Tsiolkovsky Station," JMF's essay on the train system in Growing Up Weightless.)

After All, We're All Somebody's Father: "Even understanding this vast conspiracy as well as I do, however, I still found myself astounded by the many types of Father's Day cards on offer."

Dear Photograph: the About reads "Take a picture of a picture of the past in the present." Neat.

Great Expectations, by Dickens Charles: of interest to anyone who's ever read the footnoted edition of any translated literature.

An interview with Norton Juster (author of The Phantom Tollbooth), and another. "One day I made up these three demons for [illustrator Jules Feiffer], one short and fat, one tall and thin, and the third who looked exactly like the other two, and of course you can’t draw it. It’s impossible. The way he got his revenge, there’s a picture of the Whether Man, which is me."

Buried in this piece on Aardman Studios (the Wallace & Gromit studio) is mention that their next movie will be The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists. "Remember my motto: 'I like ham!'" "It's a very good motto, sir."

*pant* Okay, that should be enough for now.

As previously mentioned, rbandrews and diadelphous came out from Texas for the weekend. On Friday they braved the flurrying snow and went into the District to wander through the Smithsonian, accompanied by uilos. I joined them all for dinner at Afterwords and we browsed the bookstore and got cupcakes from Hello Cupcake. (While waiting for them I had time to read It's A Book, which was very cute and also had a monkey.)

HC was out of the day's gluten-free cupcakes, which was a disappointment since half the point of going to Dupont was to pick some up so we'd have them the next day. Oh well. The cupcakes they had were delicious and totally worth the trip.

( But why, you may ask, did we need gluten-free cupcakes? )

Sunday we got up and saw our Texan visitors off, and stopped by my parents' place for my father's birthday lunch. Then we came home and collapsed for several hours.

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People keep asking me if I feel any different. The only answer I've been able to come up with is "Now I have less cake."

From pameladean: "My partner Raphael has a Dreamwidth account." Raphael's profile notes that zie "wrote a book once, but that was in another century, and besides, it's out of print." It's one of my very favorite books, so I'm quite pleased to see zir writing more, even if it's "just" blog posts. (RSS feed: centuryplant_dw)

From Tor editor Beth Meacham: "Mike Ford's unfinished novel ASPECTS is awaiting the completion of some supplementary material before being scheduled for publication." I'm pretty much thrilled by this. (If you haven't read The Dragon Waiting, or Heat of Fusion, or, heck, the Occasional Works, you are Missing Out. In the best possible way, because now you get to read all those things for the first time.)

Currently rereading the Hitchhiker's "trilogy" for what may be the first time since the publication of Mostly Harmless. (I've listened to the radio shows countless times since then, and seen the movie, and I think I may have even seen the BBC series as well.) They hold up well. I'm looking forward to rereading Mostly Harmless; at the time I thought it was subpar and depressing with some occasional good bits, so I only read it the once. It'll be like having a whole new Douglas Adams book.

WHEREAS, the Feast of St. Valentine has repeatedly proven offensive or inconvenient to the majority of the American People;

WHEREAS, the Feast of St. Valentine has been demonstrably debased by unseemly commercialism and rapacious greed;

WHEREAS, all attempts to celebrate the Feast of St. Valentine in the common way debase the true arts of love;

WHEREAS, the above factors in combination have continued to cause strife,discomfort and misery in the Greater Portion of the American People;

WHEREAS, the activities surrounding the Feast of St. Valentine debase and shame the American People;

AND WHEREAS, a more appropriate and honorable claim to that day exists;

NOW, THEREFORE, we decree that the celebration of the Feast of St. Valentine be hereby ABOLISHED;

AND WE FURTHER ORDER that the Fourteenth Day of February each year be rededicated to the celebration of the birth of Joshua Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, who, by the grace of God, ruled his people wisely and well for more than twenty years.

(originally by kfringe; if you re-post, please link back to this post.)

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Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day,
And Alphonse has a score:
Let in the guys, that after play
Never departed more.

--John M. Ford

Draco concordans, of interest to scathach and perhaps one day to elf *poke*, and probably to anyone else who's come by a copy of The Dragon Waiting. (And if you haven't it's readily available on Amazon.) Zarf is a mad and ambitious man for tackling this project. I would dearly love to see it set in print a la The Annotated Alice. I like the medallion design (upper right), too.

Through the Looking Glass: an interview with William Gibson. "People are still asking me about the death of the book, and yet here I am and every day I go out to the biggest bookstores that have ever existed and are doing the most business daily of any bookstores in history."

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Highlights from the past week or so:

• People over for gaming on Monday afternoon/evening, split about evenly between ABG and LJ folk. Pretty consistently had two games going at any given time, which is approaching the 'comfortable' limit for my apartment. Gaming with non-gamers is, as uilos observed, qualitatively different from gaming with people who do this several times a month; it's partly a focus on the game, and partly being used to absorbing game concepts quickly. (Curiously, jonny_law falls into the "gamer" category.) Insert lament for Spiel here. I think everyone had a good time; I certainly did.
  
• Stealing time on Wednesday for lunch with tulip_tree, as she breezed through from Toronto to Dulles to Charlottesville. Reconnecting with old friends makes me happy.
  
• GMing on Thursday, for the first time since the dissolution of the Tuesday Night Music Club in late 2003. I ran Jared Sorensen's Lacuna for the small-press RPG night folk at the Compleat Strategist, and overall it went well. Details to follow, probably later today.
  
• The neverending service pack release at work (featuring not one but two entirely new products) is lumbering towards RC.

Friday night uilos and I got all dressed up and went out to Da Domenico for a /very/ tasty dinner, involving crab-with-a-C for her and gnocchi in a delicious four-cheese sauce for me. It's no Zeppolis (I suspect that the gnocchi and the fettucine alfredo are the only cream sauces they have) but it'll do.

Satyrday I pushed furniture around and then people came over and read things, and it was Good. You all /rock/. (Plus you showed sufficient admiration of my bookcases and contents therein.) I will definitely be doing this again at some point, perhaps towards the end of the summer.

(Anyone interested in additional pieces by Mr Ford should consult Jim Macdonald's carefully compiled list of Occasional Works in eight parts. Warning: may induce uncontrolled hysterical laughter.)

( A set list )

"Everything is connected. That's why it shorts out so often." --JMF

My utter slackness and need for a Morning of Rest prevented me from catching up with Scott M-- and/or Jeff F-- on Friday morning. Instead I alternated between playing _Fire Emblem_ and writing bits and pieces of my rant about plot in video games.

(The abbreviated version of said rant is that plot ought not come at the expense of gameplay, and that wandering around town clicking a button to move through a conversation tree is not gameplay. There are games whose plot I adored: Thief: the Dark Project and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, to name just two. These games also had compelling gameplay to back up their plot.) (Darkened Skye didn't have plot, really, nor did it have gameplay that was all that compelling. What it had was a great sense of humor. I will forgive much for dialog such as "Go ask Gannish. She's the obligatory wise old knows-everything character.")

Friday afternoon there were games and people at elf's, including half a game of Caylus. Perhaps next time she'll get to play it to completion. Then I drove out to Rockville (which is not Gaithersburg and I don't know why I keep calling it Gaithersburg) to be sat on by Kai and Chaos for a bit. Then home.

Satyrday morning I got on a plane. Details of my adventures in oddly snow-bound Seattle are forthcoming. I got in Monday evening and had a lengthy Conversation. Not precisely how I'd wanted to spend the day but still better than some I've had.

Anybody got any recommendations for a program to get MP3s off an iPod such that their file names will reflect the actual song and/or artist?

Pan's Labyrinth: "What happens when make believe believes it's real?" Based on the trailer and on Mr Neil's reaction, Mr the Bull appears to have made a successful fairy-tale movie for grown-ups.

Zen Noir: "Where were you at the time of the murder?" "What exactly do you mean by . . . time?" In Seattle this week, and in Minneapolis next. Thus, I know two people (at least) that ought to see it, since I can't.

The most technically amazing sonnet ever written, Mike Ford's Janus Sonnet (scroll down). This wouldn't be much of an achievement except that it's also stunningly beautiful. "We find / For faith and miracles, sufficient time."

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In reverse order: Internet, fun, Changeling (Welcome to Glen Echo's smart really dumb faeries on ice!), lunch with parents, games, french fries while walking, Prestige again, more hugs, unpleasant but probably necessary conversation, hugs, and thus the weekend unwinds.