Words are inadequate

So, I'm not journaling. I am doing quite poorly, I think. Mostly this is a response to Lack Of Job but partly it's that I have spent an inordinate amount of time playing Silksong, a video game that came out somewhat unexpectedly at the beginning of September. Which is also something of a response to Lack Of Job.

Continuing to apply for both GIS and tech-writer jobs; so far I've seen a grand total of three responses, since May. Not great.

Anyway, I'm currently in Duluth MN at a GIS conference, in the hope that there will be Networking Opportunities. Not that I know how to Network; I am notoriously bad at being social with strangers even at SF/gaming/etc conventions.

In other fun news, the connector port on my phone died last Monday (while I was spending the day accompanying Mya for minor outpatient surgery), and the connector port on my tablet died on the way to Minnesota. The phone I can at least charge magnetically; the tablet is as good as dead until I can get it fixed. Bah. Never rains but etc. I would consider replacing my phone but a) money, and b) it is the Correct Size of phone (iPhone Mini) and they don't make them like that anymore.

Finally getting around to reading Neon Yang (fka JY Yang)'s Tensorate novellas. I forget who recommended these, or if it was anyone specific vs a general "hey these exist and are pretty good". They are in fact pretty good: Chinese-inflected fantasy, magic that feels magical, excellent prose and broad but quite believable characters.

Onward. Sleep and then more sociable.

The good news is, I got my new phone, and I got to spend time with some good friends. Other than that, meh.

( all else is commentary )
This weekend Erin and I pop down to Kelowna to look at trucks for her. I am looking forward to this. At the very least it will be less frustrating on a personal level.

Early Saturday morning, after a fairly exhausting couple of weeks, I flew back into Vancouver. I drove out to Zee's (where I was crashing for the first night) and dropped off my stuff, and then went Out And About.

I had Plans for my day: exchange my phone, make it to a Vancouver yoga class (for the first time in I think around five months) followed by a yin yoga class for relaxation and stretching, then dinner, then a couple of movies at the Cinematheque which is the local artsy / old movie theatre. At eight they were showing The Wicker Man which I've not seen, followed by Kill List which was directed by Ben Wheatley, who also did the brilliant? visually stunning? incomprehensible? A Field in England.

Like so many plans, these did not really survive contact with the enemy.

I did start by, finally, succesfully exchanging my overpriced new phone for a slightly less overpriced one. New phone's name is Faris, after the breeding-program-produced general who hears the voices of the Wild Machines in Mary Gentle's sprawling late-15th-century alternate history Ash. This is perhaps my favourite name for an electronic device yet, and tied with Keishi Mirabara Hamster for my favourite name for anything. (Keishi was my rescue hamster who lived in a series of tubes; Keishi Mirabara is also a character in Raphael Carter's amazing post-cyberpunk The Fortunate Fall who existed primarily online.)

I then sat around in Pacific Centre Mall with my new phone hooked up to my laptop, playing the Restore From (different) Backup game. This was, eventually, successful, although not quickly enough that I could make it to the four PM yoga class. I did make it out to the yin class, at least, by way of attempting to catch the #19 bus, giving up, and catching a different bus that got me most of the way there.

The yin class was lovely and stretchy. I've really missed yoga in Vancouver but that's a different post.

Afterwards I walked out Kingsway to attempt to catch a #19 back into downtown, where I could find dinner and wander to the Cinematheque. I waited ten minutes in the cold and wind before giving up. When I lived in Coal Harbour the #19 was the bus I'd take to get to/from the Skytrain downtown, and it would occasionally just decide to not bother showing up. I suppose it's nice that some things never change.

So I grumbled, and went and got a carshare car. By that point I realised that I could either get dinner, or catch the 8pm start of The Wicker Man, but not both, and dinner was kind of important. And I was irritated enough (and, likely, hungry enough) to give up on the whole idea of movies altogether.

Instead I drove off to the big Chapters bookstore on Granville, and picked myself up a consolation copy of Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth, which I am told can be summed up as "lesbian necromancers in space". I now have a large collection of 2019-published space opera that I'd like to start making some headway on.

And somewhere around the 'wandering around in a bookstore' portion of the evening I decided to take myself on a date, because it's been awhile since I've deliberately done anything nice for myself. So I went and had acceptable pad thai, and then walked a couple of blocks to a cheesecake restaurant that I'd been to once before and I recalled as being, mm, sort of jazz-cafe-like.

Which it was: dim lighting, small tables, no real food but decent cheesecake and tea, and a guy playing the baby grand piano. He was enjoying himself, too, in a room full of people mostly ignoring him. I've meant to ask Moira what it's like to perform as background. It seems like something that'd be unpleasantly ego-bruising. I must have watched and listened for half an hour while I was slowly eating, and he seemed to appreciate the audience. I'm not the biggest fan of piano in general: it all sort of blends together in my head, for whatever reason. It's lovely to see someone doing a thing and doing it well and having fun with it, though.

Turned out to be a good evening despite the collapse of half my plans, is I guess what I'm saying.

We've unevacuated. The fire's listed as "contained," which I think means "it's probably not going to break through, unless something really unexpected happens." The evacuation order/alert was lifted on Sunday as Erin & Josh were rolling out from Williams Lake, and the house is getting back into shape.

Relatedly, it's autumn up here. There was fog a few mornings ago, and temps in the lower teens. I miss fall. It won't last long, I expect; the garden's already getting frost at night. Still.

Relatedly, plans for the Great October Nonworkening are afoot. So far all I know for certain is that it starts with Scintillation (successor to Farthing Party) in Montreal over Canucksgiving. Possibilities include MD Renfest, gaming in Arlington with John Kerr et al, and a trip to Blacksburg. (Now if the IRS would just give me my %&$ tax refund so I could start making solid plans...)

I have made pancakes, on a dry castiron griddle even, and they turned out well. (Previous experiments in making pancakes on castiron have tended to involve A Lot Of Oil, because that provides the texture Erin prefers and because when I'm at home I tend to use my nonstickish aluminum griddle.) This, coupled with yesterday's almost wholly satisfactory experiment in grilling cheeses, is likely to result in the elimination of the nonstickish aluminum griddle from my kitchen stock. I'm okay with this; it's had enough sticky burnt onto it that it's a pain to clean.

I did not in fact lose a friend last week.

Poking around looking for covers of Nick Cave's "The Ship Song" other than Concrete Blonde's, whose version I consider definitive solely by virtue of being the first one I heard, and I came up with the Sydney Opera House version. Moving and impressive.

Next Tuesday I will know whether Apple will deign to release another phone with Objectively Correct proportions (the iPhone 5/SE form factor; I explicitly Do Not Want a phone that is difficult to manipulate with only one hand, plus I like my headphone jack), and will be able to take steps to replace my dropped-too-often phone that currently has difficulty with things like "being a phone."

I have Commonweal 4 (Under One Banner) awaiting me on my phone; I have Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire with me here; at home I have the next volumes of Walter Jon Williams's space opera awaiting me. Not to mention books by Kat Howard, Claire Humphrey, and Fonda Lee. I'm continually committing Schopenhauer's error of mistaking the acquisition of books for the time in which to read them, but then I've been doing that for years and years now. It's just gotten worse in the last N.

I have a remarkable number of folks who love me and care about my wellbeing. I am not entirely certain what to do with this information, as "believe it entirely" is somewhat difficult.

Over vacation I read Charles Stross's six- three-volume Merchant Princes series. They're good stuff. The first one's a normal SF worldwalker book, and the next two are much more contemporary thrillers that happen to include a worldwalking component. Also, the twin central messages are 'Economic development is tricky' and 'Stop romanticising the past.'

They are also, as Charlie noted, big fat books. I mostly didn't notice this, because ereaders are a thing of lightweight beauty.

Over the weekend I got a desire to reread Umberto Eco's big thick secret-history Foucault's Pendulum. My copy is a giant hardback, because it looks nice on my shelf and because when I was carrying a large backpack around campus one more big book didn't really make a difference.

Now? I am genuinely *irritated* that I can't just open it on the iPad. Instead I have to deal with a physical volume that causes me physical strain to hold in one hand, and that doesn't fit in my coat pocket. I am almost (almost) considering plopping down more money for an ebook edition.

I suppose this is how 'and then i replaced my library with ebooks' starts.

---

Two quotes about Foucault's Pendulum:

1) "Dan Brown is a character in my book." --Umberto Eco, on being repeatedly asked if he'd read The Da Vinci Code
2) "Nobody gets Foucault's Pendulum except for literary critics and role-players." --James Palmer

(Not that anyone asked.)

0) Upgrading went smoothly on my 4S. Had some minor connectivity problems with trying to download the required iTunes update, but those went away when I tried again a few hours later.

1) Control Center. I feel like I have been waiting nearly five years for this. Things you do semifrequently-- Do Not Disturb, use the LED camera flash as a flashlight, timer, calculator, enable or disable wi-fi or Airplane Mode-- are no longer buried in settings, but are instead accessible with a quick swipe up from the bottom of the screen, even when the phone is locked. Result: Settings app no longer takes up space on my first home screen.

2) I still can't delete useless system apps (Stocks wtf?), but folders are no longer artificially limited to twelve items, so I can dump more junk into a single folder. (Also, Newsstand can now be placed in a folder. ABOUT TIME.) All the apps that are accessible from Control Center are now on the second page of my Rarely Used folder.

3) I can't get to the Music (formerly iPod) app by double-tapping the Home button and swiping left anymore. Instead it's been poorly integrated into Control Center. If there's no music playing I have to hit Play, wait for it to start playing a random song, and then tap the song title to open the Music app. Result: the Music app must now take up space on my dock. I wouldn't mind except that its deep red app icon looks awful next to the subdued blue Mail and the vibrant green Phone and Messages.

4) Also, Music seems to forget what it was playing five minutes ago even more often now than it used to.

5) Speaking of broken workflows, deleting items from a list now requires a right-to-left swipe. Previously either left-to-right or right-to-left would enable a Delete button. Annoying.

6) Everything just feels a bit less responsive than I'm used to. Not sure if that's actually the case, or if I'm missing tap/swipe targets due to the thin-line appearance updates, and thus it'll get better as I get used to it.

7) The appearance updates themselves are a wash. For the OS itself: I like the thinner system font and I don't mind the new 'flatter' look in general. In specific apps: I don't care for Mail's spartan lines and I don't like the changes to Maps or Safari. Edit: and Calendar is a big pile of DO NOT WANT. Ugh.

8) I am one of the last holdouts against the combo search/URL box, and am irritated that they've finally forced me to start using it in Safari.

9) Okay, that parallax effect where the icons appear to be floating above the background is actually pretty neat.

10) In another month I will not care about any of this. After three months I will take it all for granted.

Taranis the laptop is in the shop again, getting last year's display issue fixed for real this time. I hope. Buying refurbished didn't really save me any hassle this time I guess, although I would have bought the three-year Applecare warranty anyway. (Only warranty I'll buy, because they're good about honoring it.) So it's saved me a little money anyway.

This whole episode has mostly served to remind me that the Device Mk II can be used as an internet reading device, but it's extremely frustrating to do so. Also I still hate the keyboard.

("First world problems? You bet, but that's where I live." --Megan Heller)

In other, abbreviated, news: saw Priscilla Queen of the Desert last night for the first time. How odd, is about all I can say. Guy Pearce, Terence Stamp, and (especially) Hugo Weaving would not have been my first instinct for casting in a road movie about three drag queens, but they do exceptionally well.

I don't know if I'm doing better than a couple of weeks ago but I'm not feeling quite so adrift about it. Thank you.

Work is being workish and just dropped a ton more work on my head, on top of all the work I've been putting off because hey look over there, a procrastinabob! So the next couple days will be awful. Starting tonight.

And likely because of that I'm still in hiding-from-everything mode and don't want to do anything, and haven't revised a bit of my stupid deeply frustrating story. Which I wanted to have out the door by the time summer con season got started. GUESS WE BLEW THAT ONE.

And I go to the beach next week. Which would be awesome and relaxing but there will be work, and why will there be work? Because I felt stressed out and slacked off and didn't get it all done by now, that's why. Not to mention the packing and planning and non-work everything that needs to happen before we leave. Including figuring out how we're getting to SeaTac (current best answer: by Amtrak bus, getting us there IF EVERYTHING GOES RIGHT at 8:30 PM, half an hour away by transit for a 10:15 flight).

After that we'll be in Richmond (Va) for a couple of days and then in the DC area for a couple of days, and then we fly to Madison for Wiscon. Which will hopefully not suck, and will in any event be populated by a large number of awesome people I have not seen since October (or, in two fortunate cases, since March).

But the DC part is going to be rough because there is simply not enough time to see all the awesome people I want to see.

There's a Hokusai exhibit at the Sackler gallery, and since I just finished rereading Zelazny's only-female-main-character mood piece "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai" we are likely going to that on Monday. And dinner with my folks on Tuesday and working from work Tues and Weds and flying out of National on Wednesday night. Gah time.

And then after Wiscon I come home and go back to work, nominally relaxed and recharged and in reality just jetlagged and lonely.

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Today I am grateful for the perfect weather, for being a beta-tester for Spectromancer for iPhone, for a handful of pretty kick-ass friends. For having a job that pays me to be where I want to be.

Sent out the last of the post-office saving letters earlier this week. So if you've not gotten one by, say, this time next week, and you ought to have, let me know.

At Crooked Timber, commenter Lemuel Pitkin on Steve Jobs:

Worth noting that in all the tributes to Steve Jobs, nobody is saying "He was a rational agent who maximized the present value of his lifetime consumption, and would have wrecked his company in a second if he thought that would net him a dollar more. We will continue running Apple to generate the maximum profits for shareholders, whether that means putting out great products, putting out crappy products, or liquidating the whole thing." Instead, they all talk—sincerely I'm sure—about his commitment and dedication to his work, and say things like "his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple." It’s a nice illustration of how capitalism’s biggest success stories are really arguments against capitalism.

(see also ajay @32)

In related news, I preordered the Device Mark 2 this morning. (Delivery estimate: 1-2 weeks. Which is okay; if it got here on the release date I wouldn't be around to play with it anyway.) The Device has served me well for nearly three years, but between the inexorable march of technology and the flaky headphone jack (and AT&T's obscene refusal to allow me to use a device that I purchased with any other carrier), it's time for it to take a well-deserved retirement.

Restless lately. Fall out here is made of Wet, which doesn't make for much in the way of scuffly leaves, and it's harder to get excited about going out in the damp. Too, I'm half eagerly awaiting VP/Boston and half thinking "wait, how can it be october already, i'm not nearly prepared for this." Impostor syndrome is kicking in like nobody's business.

But the mist is nestling in among the tops of the trees in Stanley Park, and I seem to have gotten enough sleep last night, and Portal 2 was on sale earlier this week. And, you know, tomorrow I get on a plane to spend a week with a bunch of awesome people, and then a couple of days with different but still awesome people. Life is decent.

*whrrrr*

Is that my phone buzzing?

*whrrrr*

No, I remembered to turn the ringer on.

*whrrr*

. . . oh. It's Chaos snoring.

*whrrr*