jazzfish: Pig from "Pearls Before Swine" standing next to a Ball O'Splendid Isolation (Ball O'Splendid Isolation)
Last night's dreams were... confusing and fragmented, to say the least. I was constantly grieving for one or another of my current cats (who are very much alive) and/or Tommy the cat from my childhood who's been gone for almost fifteen years now. I also started dating someone who is in waking life a very casual online acquaintance, started a storm at sea that swamped a boat filled with tiny people who may or not have been other friends of mine, and somehow caused [personal profile] uilos to lose about half the green pearls off her necklace, about which I was a lot more upset than she was. O, brain.

Still somewhat stressed over work. Still not writing, other than the Upgrade Guide, which is not supposed to be fiction anyway. All that should let up in a week or so.

Finished eBear's Range of Ghosts yesterday. Quite good. Still, to paraphrase James Nicoll, I hope in my lifetime to see the death of the bound book-fragment mode of writing. It's all build-up for a story, albeit one that does at least have an end in sight (2014, I expect).



A couple of weeks ago I was talking with [personal profile] uilos trying to figure out what I wanted to do, since nothing felt at all interesting. She bounced a couple of ideas off me and I kept saying "no, that's not it."

"Well, do you want to... sit around and play video games?"

"I can't, because the old consoles don't connect well to the television and it's annoying to have that half-second lag and... and this is a 'can't' not a 'don't wanna.' Hm."

So I went out and bought a Wii, on the grounds that it'll play my existing Gamecube games. That and a component video cable seem to have done the trick. Whomped my way through Eternal Darkness again and felt a bit better about things.

As far as actual Wii games: I'm told I should get both Mario Galaxys and New SMB, and anything labeled Kirby as well. Zelda: Twilight Princess was pretty but after about halfway through, the sheer amount of running around not doing anything interesting has really turned me off it. (That and the terminally annoying fairy who hangs around and is smug about not telling you anything.) Metroid: Other M was... decent, but too frantic to really feel epic; I've got the Prime Trilogy on order. Anything I'm missing? Anything good on Virtual Console / WiiWare?
jazzfish: A small grey Totoro, turning around. (Totoro)
Fascinating interview with William Gibson in the Paris Review: "For years, I’d found myself telling interviewers and readers that I believed it was possible to write a novel set in the present that would have an effect very similar to the effect of novels I had set in imaginary futures. I think I said it so many times, and probably with such a pissy tone of exasperation, that I finally decided I had to call myself on it."

PURE EVIL.

Irregular Webcomic, David Morgan-Mar's daily Lego-based comic with about a dozen storylines, has come to an end after well over three thousand strips. Not to worry! He's rerunning them all from #1, with new annotations. So now's the perfect time to jump into one of the geekiest and consistently funniest webcomics around. (DMM's other big venture, Darths & Droids, is nearly at the end of Episode 3. I really hope he covers episodes 4-6 as well. Luckily, according to the FAQ they'll be covering episodes 4-6 as well.)

Making the Grade, a history of maple syrup, and a good follow-up to my earlier discourse. [via [personal profile] rbandrews]



Last night's sleep was not precisely restful. I dreamed I finished up the %&$ Space Story and attached it to an email and sent it off to the editor in question. About ten seconds later I got back an email response consisting of "No." I was kind of shocked, until I realised that I hadn't actually added in any of the stuff I'd meant to and been asked to. Then I was just miserable and mad at myself for blowing my chance at getting it published.

I used to dream a lot more, and even lucid-dream about half the time. I stopped in late 2002/early 2003 when a lot of other things in life were going pretty wrong, because my dreams were all ending up like that one.

Came down with a 48-hour head cold on Thursday night, but I caught it early enough to not stress myself. Spent Friday doing not a whole lot other than sleeping and staring blankly, and was functional enough to do some gaming on Satyrday.

Sunday night [personal profile] uilos and I went to see Mr and Mrs Amanda Palmer, for whom the line was literally around the block. It was a good show: they were kind of adorable, and Neil read a few poems and "Orange," the story he read at Balticon in 2006. I'm not quite sure what I think of Amanda's music; I enjoyed it but I don't feel inspired to run out and buy albums.

We're visiting DC (ABG, Dar concert, possibly other things) this weekend, and I'll be working from work for a couple of days as well. Possibly I can use some of the travel time to do some writing. Here's hoping.
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
FEMINIST HULK SMASH EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH MS.!: "HULK LOVE POLYSYLLABIC WORDS. HULK NUZZLE BIG GREEN FACE INTO RICHLY WRITTEN FEMINIST TEXTS. ALSO, THIS JUST HOW HULK TALK."

So Much Space: "For me, 3 miles is a a rather generous estimate of the radius of my every day life. For many, 3 miles is the minimum distance to anything." I have a strong desire to be in the former situation rather than the latter.

Straylight required a new battery and an adjustment to the charging cycle so that it wouldn't kill the battery again. I have no idea what went wrong and I didn't ask; I was running later for my dentist appointment. At which she successfully numbed me up and, um, canaled my root, which was far less pornographic than it sounds. (She also recognised, or claimed to recognise, the Gywneth Jones book I was reading, and was surprised to hear that I'm not a professor.) It's odd to not have any more cold sensitivity in the teeth on that side.

Last night I dreamed that work had moved into DC. I broke three eggs into paper cups to bring them from the work kitchen to the office, and then I had to go out to an office supply store to buy printer paper. I couldn't see one from where I was, so I asked Sara B-- from high school, who was running around upset that she'd lost something. Snow was falling when I came back, so I stayed out in the snow for awhile. Not only do I sleep better when I don't dream (excuse me, "don't remember my dreams, or in fact remember that i dreamed at all"), I wake up feeling a lot less baffled by my brain.
jazzfish: an open bottle of ether, and George conked out (Ether George)
It is unlikely that [livejournal.com profile] scathach will ever leave me a message on my parents' answering machine telling me the six things that I need to break a curse. It's even less likely that three of those things will rhyme ("bun," "gun," and something else that escapes my memory; perhaps "sun"), and that the other three will be a past, present, and future version of the same thing (which also escapes my memory). And my parents do not, and will not, have any kind of "lock" on their answering machine preventing me from listening to a message a second time.

To top it off, [livejournal.com profile] scathach is certainly not going to show up on my doorstep to tell me again what the six things are, accompanied by a smiling but silent Scott M.

Note to self: if Scott M. is not talking, it is definitely a dream, of the more surreal variety, and I can wake up from it secure in the knowledge that I'm not missing anything.
jazzfish: Pig from "Pearls Before Swine" standing next to a Ball O'Splendid Isolation (Ball O'Splendid Isolation)
What's on TV? Oh, the usual sci-fi fantasy, read by women in bed: "They've put a lot of imagination into appearing to be foolish." [via [livejournal.com profile] skreidle]

Best poster ever. [via [livejournal.com profile] tirani]

United States ex. rel. Gerald Mayo v. Satan and his staff [one-page PDF]: "We note that the plaintiff has failed to include with his complaint the required form of instructions for the United States Marshal for directions as to service of process." As an added bonus, the judge finds that damned Stephen Vincet Benet story as judicially improbable as I do. [via Making Light]

Rhino Records puts out some damned fine compilations. Their sadly out-of-print Seducing Down the Door is almost all the John Cale you'll ever need (it's inexplicably lacking anything good or famous from Sabotage), and I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is the definitive pre-2000 Warren Zevon compilation. (This in addition to all the Tom Lehrer there is.) So when I say that they've put together the greatest Nineties boxed set ever, you understand that I'm not just saying that for effect. (Seriously, folks. Any compilation with They Might Be Giants, Jesus Jones, and M.C. Hammer gets mondo bonus points for covering all the bases-- and that's just the first disc.)

Better than fading away )

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Adventures in Mamboland

"Jazz Fish, a saxophone playing wanderer, finds himself in Mamboland at a critical phase in his life." --Howie Green, on his book Jazz Fish Zen

Yeah. That sounds about right.

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