Better late than never
I’m about to upload my photos of our Dragonfire LARP, which happened only two months ago. This is still less laggy than Hodgestar’s birthday party. In order to upload the photos I am upgrading digikam, so that I can use a non-faily flickr upload plugin. In order to upgrade digikam I need to upgrade the rest of KDE from the kubuntu-backports PPA — this is currently chugging away in the background.
I have embarked on an epic sewing project — making myself and Hodgestar medieval Japanese outfits for Here Be Dragons, the annual SCA away weekend event which is about a month away. I’m making this (except with a maroon hakama because the shop had no red linen) and this kind of thing (except black, because that’s the colour of the hakama Hodgestar already has).
The nice thing about Japanese clothing is that it’s mostly a whole lot of rectangles. The only tricky part of the kimono-type garment is the collar. I think I’ve been having problems because my seams are tiny and all the instructions on the interwebs assume that you’re going to leave enormous seam allowances — so my collars are too wide and too high up on the body and need to be re-sewn. I need to test this theory out on the two very nearly finished kosode I’ve just made. The reason I’m writing a rambly blog post and not sewing right now is that V:TES players have taken over the lounge table.
After a very long wait, my kalahari.net book order arrived, and here is my loot:
- The Never Ending Sacrifice by Una McCormack — it’s a DS9 tie-in novel; don’t judge me. I first read Una McCormack’s fanfiction during one of my previous love affairs with Deep Space Nine, and her pro fiction is just as good. This is a stand-alone story about a minor canon character.
- Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Cardassia and Andor (purchased for the Cardassia half, also by Una McCormack; I’m leaving the other half for later) — also good, but (obviously) shorter.
- Kimono: Fashioning Culture by Lisa Dalby — a well-regarded reference book about the history of kimono.
- Seed to Harvest by Octavia E. Butler — a collected edition of the entire Patternist series, except for one instalment Butler really didn’t like. Haven’t read it yet.
- Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany — currently reading. It’s slow going, because of the unusual language, but I’m enjoying it.
- Zombies Calling by Faith Erin Hicks — a fun, short zombie comic. Not much to the plot, but I really like Hicks’ art. (If she sounds familiar, it’s because she did Demonology 101.)
Recently discovered webcomics:
The upgrade has become unexpectedly exciting — I’ve hit some kind of packaging bug. I guess the photos will have to wait a bit longer. :/
Deh4xX0r3d
If you can see this, you can see my new blog. I have migrated everything to WordPress (the comments were a bit of a bitch, but awk and sed saved the day). You can find the new rss feeds on your right (at least I hope they’re on your right, otherwise my theme is horribly broken in your browser).
This site uses dynamic DNS to get around my lack of static IP, and it’s proxied by a machine which is wont to freeze or reset itself at random intervals, so if you occasionally find that this site isn’t there, don’t panic and try again later. It’s just like that good old university internet access. Plans are underway to make my machine wear the proxy pants, but I don’t know when we’ll have time for that.
Random book, and the quest for fanfiction
I’ve been sucked into the “sentences 6-8 from page 123 of your nearest book” blog meme by Gnome. I feel so dirty. D:
Technically, the books closest to me are the obsolete computing-related doorstops on which my monitor is standing. I am going to ignore them, and the other doorstops and phonebooks on which Simon’s monitor is standing, because a) lifting the monitors is hard, b) they are boring and c) they aren’t Polish. Here, instead, is an excerpt from Maska (The Mask), a collection of novellas and plays by Stanisław Lem — it was on top of the pile of books next to my bed; bite me.
“Jakże, mówię, Symfonia Bytu też w tym jest!? To warto się przyłożyć! Ale prawda li?”
It’s from a sub-story in a novella (Edukacja Cyfrania; the story of the first frozen person) which was later republished as part of the Cyberiad, but apparently not in the English language version. I haven’t read it since the last time I read the Cyberiad, and I don’t remember it at all, but if the internet and the first page are to be believed it’s about an enormous orchestra run by a musical country in space and is a veiled criticism of the communist government.
I’m not making this up.
I’m only going to tag Hodgestar, because I think everyone else has been tagged. And he can say no if he wants to; no pressure.
In other news, my l5r fanfiction plug from several months ago is on the first page of Google’s search results for “l5r fanfiction” (no quotes). Which is not very helpful when I’m the one looking for the l5r fanfiction. :/
Also, to recap: I played in Mike’s Discworld LARP, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I went to most of SchpatCON, but didn’t LARP because of lingering illness. Adeeb twisted my rubber arm and I bought Vimanarama, which is pretty cool.
Addendum
Update seems to have gone OK. I got disconnected twice at about 6:30, when the massive file transfer was nearly finished. Oh, how I hate Telkom.
The new theme is… interesting. All the padding has mysteriously disappeared. Cosmetic fiddling will, however, have to wait for some other time.
Wiki changes
I have changed the wiki skin. Please let me know if anything looks horrible on IE so that I can make fun of you for using IE and tell you to get a proper browser try to fix it.
I also rearranged the structure of the Sigil pages a bit and added licence information. Coming soon: actual setting writeups.
Argharghargh…
More teething troubles with the blog. Hopefully the file permissions are now *just right* for it to be able to create all the new directories it wants; I will have to check tomorrow.
If you've tried to post something and had an error pop up, this is why. It should be fine now.
Buy someone a cow
Recent Tweets
- @firstfallen I like option 4 too. Option two is also nice, but kind of busy.
- Twitter, you are making me sad in my pants. Fix your damn RSS feeds or stop linking to them. http://tinyurl.com/2apmyjv
- @AnnaMalczyk It wasn't hard -- wasn't actually using it for anything. Stupid LJ crossposting feature was final straw. Do not want! D:
- Or not so much. Now exploring these possibilities: http://tinyurl.com/382w9kg
- http://topsy.com FTW; actually seems to have access to full Twitter history.
- @TheRiver I'm following these instructions; don't know how "complete" this is: http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account
- I just nuked my Facebook account. When the boat anchor starts biting your ankles, it's time to let go.
- @firstfallen I don't think you're being oversensitive. Waiting would have cost little and been worth a lot. They chose to be dicks about it.
- @firstfallen They all deserve to be summoned to a compulsory team-building workshop on Christmas Eve. :P
- I think encasing the whole block in this tree would make the street look much better. Cut window and door holes. http://tinyurl.com/2vjhg3m
