Addendum

December 28, 2005 · Posted in Meta · 1 Comment 

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.

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Happy miscellaneous holiday!

December 28, 2005 · Posted in General · Comment 

Mmm, holidays. I have nearly finished System of the World, and I watched all of Elfen Lied with Simon – courtesy of Mark and his 80G portable hard drive. Hooray!

We have also been making Christmas presents for people and we have a vague plan to clean the house, and invite people to dinner, but mostly we are doing absolutely nothing except reading, watching anime and surfing the internet. In fact, because I am very lazy and on holiday, this will be a very short and woefully incomplete entry.

In other news, the blog got rather uninspiringly hacked; probably by a bot, since a human would presumably have left a note saying “hAhAhAhAhA j00 wuz pwnz0r3d by k00l h4xX0r d00d & his kr3w3″, or something, and instead I just found my password mysteeeriously changed. So I am updating to a later version of the blog software, which will hopefully be more like gouda and less like ementhaler, security-wise.

In lieu of an exhaustive recounting of my whereabouts and activities over the past half-month, here is an anthology of selected quotes from bad Harry Potter fanfiction, for your enjoyment, because you aren't really having a good time until you have snorted your beverage out through your nose and into your keyboard. Merry Dies Natalis Solis Invicti!

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Sign of life, and also comics

December 14, 2005 · Posted in General, Reviews · Comment 

So, I forget about my blog for… oh, all right, over a month, and when I come back I find that people have actually left comments while I was gone. Hello there, you patient people; I hope you all have feed readers.

I got a cold over the weekend, and so I am grumpy. I got the cold from standing in too many drafty places. Fortunately, other things I got over the weekend (personally, or by proxy) are: the new CD of The Sleepers (a band containing people I know, which I had never actually heard before; and they’re pretty good), an amber necklace (in the gift-giving game at the SCA Yule event, which was fun) and very tasty sushi (at the office Christmas dinner on Friday night). Also, somewhat earlier, I bought The System of the World (being entirely unable to wait for Christmas), and it is proving a very effective distraction from the feeling that my nose and throat are full of slugs and lichen.

On Friday was the company Christmas dinner, at a Japanese fusion restaurant in Mouille Point called Wakame, which was very nice. Several members of the company who are normally in the UK were here in Cape Town, and I met most of them for the first time. Philip and I left at about 10 or 11, to make The Sleepers’ CD launch at Hectic on Hope. Which was absolutely packed, and either extremely smoky or extremely drafty, depending where you stood, much as is always the case with clubs. I’m glad we have the CD, though.

On Saturday we went to the SCA Yule event. In the morning I cleaned and polished the goblets, cleaning several copper coins in the process and at one point accidentally plating copper from one goblet onto the surface of the other one. I think it all came off with further polishing. Later, on the spur of the moment, I decided that a few hours before the event was the best time to fix the false collar on Hodgestar’s tunic, since I would never remember to do it otherwise. As always happens with sewing projects of any kind, it took about four times longer than it could reasonably have been expected to take. We were only half an hour or so late.

One of our goblets did quite well (that is, was picked early and stolen a lot) in the gift-giving game. The other fared more badly, since to get it to make sounds one had to shake it more vigorously than the players were doing. Next year we are definitely sticking copious bling to the outside of every present, and putting rattling things on the inside.

On Sunday we played VtES with Kevin and Neil, using our four new Leibon decks again; this time I tried a different one and did much less badly than the last time, in spite of being zombified and deathly ill. Well, maybe not deathly ill, but I think the massive amounts of (mostly) vitamin C and (more than one) Grandpa (for foreigners: a lethal cocktail of aspirin, paracetamol and caffeine in powdered form which I have been assured by my GP is Very Bad For Me, but which I like to take anyway when I have a headache or fever because it works more quickly and reliably than anything else) I consumed that day were what was making my legs tingle, almost as if I had vertigo. (No, nothing is tingling anymore, so it couldn’t have been that serious.)

Yesterday we had dinner with my parents. While my mother’s appreciation of the works of Neal Stephenson is variable (she liked Cryptonomicon, but couldn’t get into Quicksilver), I’ve had a 100% success rate so far with Vernor Vinge (A Fire Upon the Deep) and Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles). And I have a lot more Ray Bradbury books in my house, although I don’t think I’ve enjoyed anything quite as much as TMC.

Now, the comics! Have I mentioned that Juathuur is really cool? It’s really cool, and still alive and in good health.

Extemporanea kept mentioning Girl Genius, and I kept meaning to check it out, and I finally did. It’s a steampunk comic about mad science. It has an interesting plot, great art, humour, and everything else you might want in a comic (yes, including scantily-clad good-looking people). There are two streams, both updated three times a week: the first is a re-release of the books which were printed before the webcomic was established, and the second picks up where those books left off. Eventually they will meet. You might want to wait until then, or simply not read the second stream yet, if it bothers you that it contains some spoilers for the first.

Dicebox was on Girlamatic when I first found it; now it has moved to its own site, and you can read the whole archive for free. It’s a story about two down-and-out factory workers in a high-tech future society, and their travels and adventures. There are hints of some kind of alien subplot. The art is excellent.

And now it is time for me to attempt to sleep, in spite of the slugs and lichen.

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