Stained Glass Wings

1:43pm: hoping that all of you are having as good a time as possible
Here has been a pretty good Christmas, on the whole. Good company, good food, and the joy of seeing people made happy by what I got for them. And thanks to everyone who sent me cool stuff. *hug*hug*hug* I seem to have got my sleep patterns under control again, at last, too; that was getting very uncomfortable by Christmas Eve night.

The plan to see the new Richard Linklater film with Z tomorrow has been unfortunately sunk by it leaving cinemas already. But Gran Torino was one of the presents I got papersky, so we may watch that instead. other than that, there's freezing rain out and we will be staying in, I think.

10:29pm: writing: Armageddon Dreams
epilogue: 1936 words, and that's an end.

Which puts the whole beast around 491,000 words.

Also, this means I have got to that point within thirteen years of starting it after all.

Any number of things still need doing to it; but not now.

12:29pm: I did not need this comparison today
My part of grant app == about twice as much work as writing up my PhD thesis in about a quarter the time.

Deep breaths.

*scream*

Deep breaths.

1:18pm: review: Men Who Stare At Goats
This is a dumb movie. But sometimes, particularly after a week like last week, an amiable dumb movie is no bad thing.

Ewan MacGregor plays journalist Bob Wilton, who after the collapse of his marriage wanders off to Kuwait in the ill-formed hope of getting to get into Iraq and do some Meaningful Journalism. Instead he bumps into Lyn Cassady [ George Clooney ], a former member of the US military's psychic supersoldier program, with whom he embarks on a buddy-movie road-trip of sorts, during which Cassady tells him the story of said program, and the extent of Cassady's disjunct from consensus reality slowly becomes clear.

The 2002 road-movie stuff is fluff, though rather well-acted fluff with some very pretty deserts, and it leans way too hard on Clooney's constantly referring to his program as "Jedi warriors" while Ewan MacGregor looks bemused. (We got the allusion the first time; it wasn't funny then either.) The flashbacks are somewhat better; Jeff Bridges as Colonel Bill Django, founder of the New Earth Army, is very much The Dude from The Big Lebowski in a uniform, and amusing in a dumb way; Kevin Spacey is a suitably malevolent villain, and Clooney's particular odd value of hero's journey more or less works. The Men Who Stare at Goats walks a rather narrow line between satirising the silliness of its premise and being positive about the value of sincere devotion to even a completely crazy idea; about the only thing seriously wrong with it, if one accepts the premise as worth doing to begin with, is not cutting the very last shot a second or so earlier.

Also, somebody should tell the IMDB that their newsflash headline reading "Clueless Star Brittany Murphy Dies" contains a particularly unfortunate ambiguity. (ETA: they seem to have added helpful quotation marks.)

8:40pm: two great tastes, &c.
The Prophecy fanvid set to the shorter version of "Fundamentum".

(Somewhat bloody in spots, and could be construed as spoilery, but cool.)

11:59am: "...no-one can harm you now/though your face/though your face be scarred"
Workshop complete, and survived. $boss1 thought my bit went rather well, despite messing about with lack of connectivity, having to switch browsers in mid-stream, and further issues of the sort that arise when a class of thirty people all try to download the same whole-genome thingy simultaneously. Also, I had a lot more sympathy with $visiting_presenter requesting someone to take the middle chunk of the workshop once I realised he had been doing the same thing every day all week.

A collection of cheery or awesome or both things seen online recently:

"Paint it Black" in the style of VNV Nation. Whether it actually is VNV or not is the subject of a long argument in the comments, but it's cool anyway. Link c/o hawkwing_lb.

An eleven-minute version of Lesiem's "Fundamentum".

c/o james_nicoll, Reflection from a lake on Titan.

For fans of "Powers of Ten", a video on the same theme from the American Museum of Natural History. Except that everything in this one is a real mapped object.

Similarly, pointing in the other direction, scaled image allowing zoom from a coffee bean to a carbon atom.

9:18am: morning experience in haiku form
workshop in an hour,
my jaw is tense down one side;
hurts like a bastard.

12:45pm: squee ! (But cerebrally)
Pierre Menard, Author of the Principia (pdf).

Link c/o Ken MacLeod in comments at Making Light.

2:58pm: the thing about teaching from a really well designed project..
..is that it all fits together so sensibly that finding a coherent place to start from is not easy. Multiple sensible internal cross connections, and a need to push down hard on my tendency to "ooh shiny".

Having three different versions with three interfaces that have pretty much the same features, in a very different arrangement and with a different look and feel, does not help.

2:06pm: also
Assume I'll effectively not be online at all during the day Friday.

12:55pm: run away turn away run away turn away run away
My father wanting me to call him yesterday turned out to be basically to hassle me; I think I did at least get through to him not to mail me saying things are "urgent" in this sort of context in ways that are not distinguishable from someone having a major health crisis, but it was still no fun.

I continue to fret about this workshop; $boss2 is in today, so I can ask him about computer availability for me while giving it when he gets back from lunch.

Also, given the $bosses' tendency to do a lot of things at the last minute in re grant apps, there appears to be no way a March 1 deadline for such is compatible with me going to Boskone this year. Insert sulphurous invective of choice here.

All of which plus annoying hardware things to fix the other night translate to a Bit of a Downer, so. Am not actually feeling too dreadfully fretful or depressed, but am cognisant that it's a notable effort to avoid that.

In cheerier news, a very happy birthday ashbet, hugs and good wishes and I hope your present got there on time.

2:07pm: choose your weapon, time to pay
Yesterday's shopping trip went fine apart from the thing that wasn't there when I went looking for it, the thing I couldn't complete because of forgetting to bring an essential component, and the thing I forgot about altogether until I got home.

Seminar in an hour and a half, all going well with getting the laptop to do it on, which at least a friendly grad student whose papers I regularly English-check has volunteered to go and pick up and do the people stuff there for. Also, the chap who organises them has confirmed that there will be none either next week or the first Monday back after the holiday, so I almost got not to have to do this until January 11. Damn it.

It seems we have some Ant-related data that the users in question have been trying to send us, which is not happening thus far largely because it's too large a file for our mail system. Joy and adjectivally-modified rapture.

Slept astoundingly badly last night.

11:53pm: writing: AD
Through pass and tighten on the last few chapters, interspersed with lots of pacing, tearing of metaphorical hair, and soothing Civ. I think my overcomplicated ending now actually works, insofar as I can tell without anyone else reading it.

I will, I think, do the epilogue next weekend, when Monday's seminar and Friday's workshop thing are past, rather than trying to start it now.

Now to find second readers who will actually have time and focus for reading nearly half a million words, hopefully including some who have not read the first section repeatedly and possibly to death over the last thirteen years.

Downstairs neighbours have been having a Christmas party all damned day, screaming kids en masse followed by the sort of dance music that reminds me that, as much as they are not my sort of people, they are pretty much unarguably my generation. ("Rock Lobster", the original "Tainted Love", "Small Town Boy"... )

I have also discovered a new vice, which is that it appears there are people, who are better than I was at video games which I used to play and get horribly stuck in, who record playing through said games correctly and post them to youtube, and watching these videos leads to me swearing at myself for how obvious things were that I persistently missed many years ago. I should probably not do too much of this as it's not great for the self-image.

11:42am: I have no title for this better than the one the article already has.
Cheerful link about a surprising cross-species friendship. c/o mrissa. (ETA: sorry, that was silly of me)

3:09pm: to clarify and classify
Almost all cards and packages now posted, and, as if in reward, I have a parcel to pick up on the way home today.

Workshop stuff somewhat more under control. $visiting_person mailed to make clear that his customary practice in teaching potential users is to use the Powerpoint presentations as a frame/overview to make sure he goes through all the stuff, but mostly to use the interface. Which both clarifies where I stand and fits better with what works for me anyway.

Also, $sys_admin has installed the latest version of said software on a machine I can use. It actually looks quite a bit more old-fashioned than the older ones - largely through use of Courier and black-on-white, I think - but it's pretty much the same stuff, just slightly differently laid out.

12:15pm: hoist up the scarlet sail
So:

$boss2 indicated to me last week that the workshop was going to be "here are a bunch of people with computers, you will have a computer, show them the website". $visiting_workshop_person mailed yesterday to say "here is the Powerpoint presentation you should present". These are, as you may notice, different things, requiring distinctively different approaches.

$boss2 this morning said that in the announcement he had told everyone to bring a laptop. Which does not suggest that we will be having a space at which everyone has a terminal. He is also to send me the actual announcement for the damned thing before I mail $visiting_person to sort things out. And also that they want me to talk in large part about the capacities of the desktop version rather than the online version.

$visiting_person has mailed me an enormous file, supposedly apropos of this, the which I cannot open at work.

At least I seem to have pulled back to a commanding lead in my Civ game. And I have almost everything that needs posting ready to post to people today, Christmas cards and packages wise, though it would appear that Canada Post is understandably being hit hard by the H1N1 epidemic and things may be late.

Also, having tromped through snow to the bus stop, I have now Had Enough Winter and it can go back to being summer again. (This did not work last year or the year before, but hope is a virtue.)

10:50am: bringing balance to the Force
It would appear that, having had barely a dusting of snow so far this year, the weather is determined to catch up on all the snow we could have had since October in the space of a day or two.

It is a good day to be working from home, save for the bit where something that might well be a floor polisher has been going on the other side of the wall to both my room and the room with the computer in for some time.

2:17pm: addendum to previous plan
Weather for tomorrow forecasts heavy snowfall. This makes working from home appealing.

12:43pm: "Walking the tightwire, can't look down/strung out high above you all... "
Not only is it impossible for me to access the videos explaining how to use the website I will be giving the workshop on next Friday from work, it's impossible for me to access most of the website itself from work. This is going to make being prepared to teach it rather challenging. I would suggest that I do some of this prep from home, but the $bosses are out today and tomorrow so I may do that on my own cognisance, depending.

$boss2 is now being optimistic about getting money for a different variant on the proposed new project again.

2:30pm: righteous day, out of my mind
Have been through the "webinar" (gosh I hate that neologism) stuff for the workshop, concluding that I can actually teach this if need be, to a small group, and it will be a bloody miracle if it's any more than a small group at this point. That was less fun of a Sunday than I expected. Then we had dinner at Chase and a game of Scrabble with marylace, who is leaving today, which were very pleasant. Also did a proper cache cleanup on Oberon, and a defrag; I had been unclear on the extent to which Z had not done so before passing said computer on to us, and got rid of an alarming number of gigabytes of IE temp files. And have done almost all my holiday cards for Britain and Ireland, yay.

The weekend also included an annoyingly frustrating development in a regular Civ III game, in which it turned out that the English had been stockpiling Ancient Cavalry for a couple of millennia and not doing anything with them; have kind of fought that to a standstill, but I hope I get enough breathing space to leverage my being smarter than the AI here. Communism will save me in about ten turns or so if I make it that far.

And then I got hit by the Wrecking Ball of No Sleep at 3 am again. And such sleep as I did get comprised a dream of visiting someone nice and friendly whose tiny kitten devoted the entire visit to applying needle-like claws and teeth to my hands, ankles, and any other available flesh. My subconscious is not subtle.

7:50pm: ultimate meta-cartoon
ashbet, you particularly need to see this.

link

Link c/o nancylebov.

7:22pm: writing: Armageddon Dreams
IX.14 (Raphael):1417 words. Done.
IX.15 (Malcolm):1892 words. Done.

It's all over bar the epilogue. (And all the bits I see in it next week to tighten, and the through read for continuity, and all the things I think of during the through read for continuity, and all the things I see when I next read it all and realise suck... )

IX in total: 55,822 words.
Complete text: 489,539 words.

This is close to 20 times the length of my PhD thesis.

12:46pm: watch the sun burst as it hits the ground
Last night's nightmare involved being caught on the most acrophobic fire escape ever, in a situation where I was physically paralysed by that fear, with any number of people behind me needing to come through right now. This was no fun.

$curator's cold has got worse enough that she has not been in since Wednesday. $programmer came in this morning, realised his wallet was missing, got quite upset, headed off to try to find where he had left it, and has not come back since.

$boss2 has sent me a link to a "webinar" which the visiting person wants me to watch and learn from prior to teaching from it in the workshop. None of the options for watching it appear to be workable with any of the browsers we have here, as they are rather old browsers.

9:11pm: seemingly a revolutionary notion
I wonder how well an urban fantasy with a first-person female hero/protagonist who:

- in a world in which angels, Fallen and otherwise, exist, is not Christian, nor cares much how her own ethic fits with Christian moral polarities;
- is aggressively asexual, thinks romance is icky in the same way kids of a certain age traditionally do, and rolls her eyes at supernaturally seductive supernaturals (except when it is necessary to kick their behinds);
- is pragmatic in outlook, and does not angst over ethical conundrums;
- has absolutely no time for angstmuffinry in her friends and companions;
- does not keep nor like pets, but counts among her associates beings who regard domestic cats and small dogs as the conveniently available snack food that's one of the few perks of working in human-rich urban environments, and is fine with this:

could be made to work, and whether anyone except me would be able to find her sympathetic anyway.

11:13am: so that's what the transparent bits are for
Link via ashbet

Recreating a key scene from The Matrix using Lego.

I suspect tor.com's Cthulhu theme month is at least in part responsible for the dream I had last night concerning the next hot genre: Jesuspunk.