Stained Glass Wings

interestingly strange archaeological claim

rysmiel@gmail.com — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:34:59 GMT

Three thousand years of glorious revolution at Catal Huyuk.

Seen on kenmacleodblog.

Even attempting to filter for the site's clear political predilections, this is intriguing; I'd appreciate any input anyone might have on where the more heavily used references in this paper fall on the reliable<->crank scale as it's not a field I know anything about myself.

film review: Moon

rysmiel@gmail.com — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:11:48 GMT

This was interestingly different.

The premise is that, in a base on the Far side of the moon engaged in helium-3 mining (pause for growls from james_nicoll), the single astronaut, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), is coming to the end of his three-year contract. Going out to investigate a problem with one of his robot harvesters he has a rover crash; Sam then wakes up in the infirmary with some memory loss, the explanation for which turns out to be more complicated than initally appears.

Moon is very much Sam Rockwell's film, and he is utterly excellent in it, getting the chance to show quite a wide range in a pleasingly low-key and realistic way. The feel is more than anything else reminiscent of the early travelling-to-Jupiter bits of 2001, it has a sense of this just being a guy doing his job who happens to be on the far side of the Moon, and the Kevin Spacey-voiced computer GERTY really can't be seen except in the light of HAL 9000, but holds up well both in being aware of that and in being its own solid thing. Everyone else in it is barely more than cameos. It's a very intense character study, distinctly and effectively creepy in places, treating its characters with respect and assumes they and the audience are both intelligent and decent, and very nicely unfolding its world and set-up in ways which hang together really rather well. Recommended.

today would be a good day to dry

rysmiel@gmail.com — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:00:51 GMT

The sun is out, for the first time in ages. If I had woken up an hour earlier I could have done a pile of washing this morning; as is I will do two this evening. I ended up playing Civ rather than writing last night, so we shall see what focus allows after I finish house-tidying; leaving a number of small irritating things to the point of building up momentum to do them all in a rush may or may not be sensible, but it is how I have done things this time.

Before we proceed with the new Ant data, we need to back up what we have got; which is a pain when the relevant backup script appears to have been erased late Tuesday night for no explicable reason and $sysadmin is lacking in helpful ways to restore it. Feels like the first chapter of Mostly Harmless around here today.

home alone again

rysmiel@gmail.com — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:06:39 GMT

The Infernal Workbench is a project I inherited when the group who assembled it moved on to other things. It consists of three major layers of software plus other auxiliary bits and bobs. It is complicated in Lovecraftian ways and has only ever been fully understood by its first group leader, who left several years ago; its second group leader spent about a year mostly asking me how it worked and being told that I had no clue, and then left. What it is technically supposed to do, and does rather well when it is actually working, is provide an interface and environment for running a whole lot of disparate tools and getting them to play nicely together. (The $bosses are prone to giving interns summer projects of the form "integrate shiny new tool X into the Infernal Workbench.) What it actually does, most of the time, is fall over. Our technical response to this normally consists of restart the machine, restart the database, restart the web server, and so on. $programmer has this down to something closse to a reflex action.

Of course, the day after $programmer leaves is the day when the Infernal Workbench falls over in a different way to its standard mode. $sysadmin says the machine is fine so it therefore must be a word software error and hence entirely mine to fix. When I look at the blasted thing, and what the user has said (not one of our more civilised users, either) it seems that what's happening is that the proxy server is balking and I need to go kick University-level IT people. *sigh*

Meanwhile, that "vitally urgent" task for $boss2 got completed yesterday; as of today, he has had no time to look at it. *sigh again*

Also, it is due to storm again tonight. A couple of sunny days would really help me with the clean clothes situation around now.

Also also, it is a bad idea for me to get twitchy about house-tidying late in evenings because it becomes "start task A in room 1, go to room 2 when task A requires it, notice something in room 2, start into task B, repeat", not in a getting-distracted sort of way but in an "I am teetering on an overly high priority stack which I must remember how to navigate back down" sort of way.

Also also also, I love the trailer for 9, but won't somebody think of the children who see it, love it, and next time they go to the video store try to rent 10 ?

a single chance prevails

rysmiel@gmail.com — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:39:57 GMT

This weekend I had a visiting redbird, who arrived on Friday evening, which did not quite give me as much time as I would ideally have liked for house cleaning post-papersky and zorinth's departure for Britain on Thursday, but redbird was tolerant of me boringly doing washing-up. Otherwise, sushi was consumed, good company was had, it continues sufficiently rainy and non-summer-like that the plants out back have needed less watering than I would have expected, and I found a copy of Somtow's Light on the Sound in the time-travel bookshop yesterday. Have been very oddly tired, including falling asleep for some significant time in the middle of the day Saturday, and seem to be so again today, damn it. And we went to Kam Fung for dinner yesterday and there should be enough leftovers to feed me tonight too. Workwise $curator is back and progress of sorts is happening at last.

like a weekend in the middle of the week

rysmiel@gmail.com — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:28:21 GMT

The plan to go see the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition downtown was foiled by much the same circumstances as foiled the plan to buy the new VNV album last week. We had breakfast in Reuben's, saw a bit of the Canada Day parade, the strongest descriptive adjective for which would come to mind being "multicultural"; the Gazette today says there were forty thousand people at this parade. We also saw about a dozen people marching behind a Canadian flag and a Union Jack on what appeared to be a "grumble about excessive Francophonicity" platform. The relative numbers here are pleasing. We also went out to dinner at Diogenes, more of the best calamari and doner in the world, during which there was a fair contender for the most intense storm I have ever been in the same place as; I have seen rain fall so heavily as not to be able to see the other side of the street here before, but usually for five or ten minutes at a time, not half an hour. All in all an extremely pleasant relaxed day of hanging out with family. Home internet still not reliable, but I played a little Civ instead.

And this morning I got my ATM card back from the bank, and we would seem to have a battery for the UPS for my development server. The only real downer about a weekend in the middle of the week is effectively having two Mondays.

further things that do not help

rysmiel@gmail.com — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:31:48 GMT

Being so wound up and so focused on trying to be calm and not stressing out than one forgets the bit where one takes the ATM card out of the ATM after withdrawing the money.

also

rysmiel@gmail.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:09:35 GMT

$programmer now has no idea at all whether he will be going away for a long holiday at the end of this week, at the end of next week, or at all.

This does not help. Nor do recurring nightmares about working for my father and having my teeth fall out.

better to light a sandal than to curse your blisters

rysmiel@gmail.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:41:20 GMT

papersky is back from 4th Street, I met her in the railway station Saturday evening, the train was a mere hour and a half late but having cunningly equipped myself with Queen's Play I was entirely capable of taking that in my stride. Also, we had a visiting rezendi Saturday evening and Sunday during the day, which was fun. I spent most of the weekend reading, listening to new VNV and swearing at slow internet. Also, Z and gf are now moving out for September 1 rather than August 1, due to medical things with the flat they are moving to's previous tenant.

$boss2, after making a huge fuss about getting things urgently end of the week before last, has not come back to me on some of them since; he has been busy every time I have gone to look today so far, but am hoping to catch him on this supposedly-urgent stuff some time later today.

books for May

rysmiel@gmail.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:18:37 GMT

Mick Farren, The Time of Feasting, Darklost, More than Mortal, Underland; Reread of the Renquist Quartet, dementedly over-the-top pulp vampire novels. The Time of Feasting tells the story of a power struggle within a vampire colony in New York, between elder Victor Renquist and new kid Kurt Carfax, whose arrogance and rock career suggest that he is intended as a parody of certain well known vampire antiheroes whose authors appear to see being a brat as a virtue, over handling a period when the cyclic bloodlust of the vampires is at its peak, a situation traditionally dealt with by relocating to a Third World war zone but this time disguised as serial killing in their own back yard. Darklost relocates the colony to Los Angeles, with attempts to replenish their numbers including the wooing of aging actor "Brandon Wales" (mostly Marlon Brando with maybe a little Orson Welles, uncharacteristically coy for a series that name-drops allusions to everything from Angels in America to Preacher), and coming into conflict with a Cthulhu cult that has spent the previous forty years growing from quasi-Manson Family to quasi-Scientology; More than Mortal sends Renquist to England to meet a quarrelsome female nosferatu troika, a gruesome clan of vampire highlanders and the buried cocoon of Merlin, while Underland, after Renquist's initial capture and interrogation by a superblack intelligence agency, sees him drawn into an investigation of flying saucers, Antarctic Nazi bases, and the Hollow Earth. As these summaries may indicate, the books are not what one might call deep, exactly, but they put together a workable mythos out of as wide range of lunatic parascientific tropes as can be crammed in and have a lot of fun so doing. The latter two are slightly less enjoyable, IMO, because of the much reduced part played by Renquist's colony's other members, and Underland is oddly unbalanced in that the first third or so feels to be setting up a lot of stuff in detail which does not then get played out; the way in which Underland's resolution firmly nails down a couple of loose ends from the preceding two volumes makes it feel like Farren wanted to bring the series to a definitive close at that point. Recommended if you like this sort of thing.

Mike Carey, The Devil You Know; Reread of the first of a series that are definitely becoming comfort books. In a world where the dead, shortly before the turn of the third millennium, started coming back as ghosts not by single spies but in battalions, Felix Castor, an exorcist who retired after an error of judgement inextricably entangled his best friend with the demon Asmodeus, is motivated by dire financial circumstances to take on one last job, the apparently straightforward exorcism of a ghost from the Bonnington Archive, and in fine noirish style (and brilliant Chandlerian voice) discovers things are a lot more complicated than they look. The plot is tight, the world is fascinating - and way more science-fictional than the run of urban fantasy, in that it's clear from the get-go that all the weird stuff originates from one fundamental cause which people are trying from different angles to figure out, and learning as they do so - and Castor and his principal supporting cast are delights, notably paranoid conspiracy-theorist zombie Nicky Heath and probably the best succubus ever depicted in fiction. Very highly recommended.

Ian Cameron Esslemont, Night of Knives; First of the related works set in the universe of Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen by its co-creator. Night of Knives is a much smaller book than any of the Malazan novels, both physically and in scope, focusing mostly on two characters, aging soldier Temper and naive young freelance thief Kiska, in Malaz City on the night of the prophesied return of the Emperor Kellanved, an event a few years before the start of Erikson's series and of pivotal importance to them. Because of this it's very hard to assess Night of Knives on its own merits; it's a reasonably good auxiliary volume to the main series, though, perhaps inevitably considering the importance of how details and consequence of said pivotal event unfold in the Erikson books, frustratingly much of the really important bits of what's going on stay just off-screen. For completists.

Stanislaw Lem, The Investigation; A weird, metaphysically focused riff on a classic Scotland Yard mystery, in which the young Lieutenant Gregory has to deal with inexplicable superiors, existential uncertainties, and a world incomprehensible as anything in Kafka (though without the underlying hostility) in an investigation of a situation where dead bodies are inexplicably being moved from morgues. The voice in the translation I read (by Adele Milch) hits the tone of the material being pastiched pretty perfectly, but not a book that makes many concessions to making sense in conventional terms; if three examples make a subgenre, this almost wants to be in one with "Death and the Compass" and The Man who Was Thursday.

Patricia Wrede, Thirteenth Child; Actually I quite liked it; a Little House on the Prairie-like alternate history of sorts where the progenitors of Native Americans stayed in Asia, and the American continents, full of Pleistocene megafauna and magical beings, are being colonised only in the nineteenth century, by alternate-Europeans in North America and alternate-Africans in South America. In this setting we have Eff, a thirteenth child believed to be drastically unlucky, and her twin brother Lan, a seventh son and therefore notably magically potent, moving west from relatively settled parts towards the frontire when her father gets a job teaching magic at a young university. Thirteenth Child belongs to a subgenre I am less than entirely convinced by, that of alternate histories where some fundamentals are drastically different and yet much of human history is very much the same; it is however a great deal of fun and generally well implemented - while cultures outside the one Eff grows up in are only sketched in, this is entirely appropriate to the age and direction of focus of the viewpoint character, and the characters we see from those cultures are as well-rounded as everyone else in the book, which is very. Highly recommended.

Walter Jon Williams, This Is Not A Game; Near-future-ish thriller in which Dagmar, a designer of "alternative reality" games in which players carry out missions and interact with plots generated using actors in the real world, is trapped in Indonesia when the economy collapses, and finds her online community of players a great deal more helpful than any more formal or official channels in getting her out; ensuingly, when a friend and colleague of hers is assassinated, she enlists said community in investigating it, and the line between reality and game blurs into shadowiness with some speed. This Is Not A Game is a tight and competent thriller, with some neat ideas; not a major work, but worth reading. Recommended.

William Gibson, Spook Country; It is really odd how William Gibson has gone from The New Thing in SF with Neuromancer and sequels, to day-after-tomorrow feel with Virtual Light and related works, to an almost cozy retro-feel in this latest, all while writing about a largely overlapping set of things. Spook Country has three narrative threads, following Hollis Henry, a goth musician turned serious journalist investigating cutting-edge social developments for a magazine which may or may not exist, Tito, a young member of a large Cuban immigrant family in NY who are a little intelligence business of their own, and Milgram, a drifting junkie press-ganged by a hectoring Homeland Security type. Although it nominally has a thriller plot, Spook Country is curiously sedate in some ways, and the joy of it is mostly in the precision of writing and character, and the glee of the fractally weird that it surfs. Highly recommended.

Jim Butcher, Small Favor; Tenth volume of the Dresden Files: hardcover picked up for me by the wonderful daharyn when the paperbacks of the series most annoyingly changed format. In series terms, this is a chunk of middle, but a fairly satisfactory one on the whole; Butcher's cast of characters is now far too large to have everyone show up in every volume, but Small Favor succeeds on having a reasonably solid single-volume plot, on advancing some bits of the overall arc, and on cross-connecting and developing things we thought we knew. Set in the depths of a particularly severe Chicago winter, this volume sees Harry Dresden called on to pay off the second of the three favours he owes the Queen of Air and Darkness, in retrieving mob kingpin Johnny Marcone, who as of the last volume asserted himself as a freeholding lord under the Accords that govern the supernatural world, the first vanilla-mortal human to do so, and seems to have thereby earned the enmity of some Really Bad People. The novel integrates the various things going on much better than a couple of earlier volumes which had essentially two separate sets of antagonists messing with Harry's life at the same time; it is rather more straightforwardly plotted than the previous couple of books, and does suffer a little from the increasing tendency towards inflation of time spent on climactic action scenes in Butcher's recent work. Recommended.

Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish; Reread, fourth volume of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which Arthur Dent, to his great surprise, finds himself back on Earth after all, and promptly falls head-over-heels in love with Fenchurch, a young woman whose past contains oddities that may make sense integrated with his own, a tonal shift from previous volumes that only sort of works. There are also, as if to emphasise that contrast, a few manic bits with Ford Prefect in. A minor work with a strong sense of being written to satisfy popular demand rather than out of any real desire to do so.

Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers; Second reading of the best and most ambitious of those of Burgess' works that I have read; Earthly Powers is the life of Kenneth Toomey, an English homosexual man of letters, just turning eighty-one in Malta in 1970, who is prompted to set it down when he is approached by agents from the Vatican with regard to his testimony in re a potential miracle carried out through his brother-in-law Carlo, the recently deceased Pope (in lieu of John XXIII) who is currently being considered for canonisation. Earthly Powers ranges across many different decades and several different cultures, circling around the central argument of Toomey's life, the attempt to reconcile his sexuality with his religious background; it is fascinating on the evolution of concepts and conceptions of homosexuality, and has an oddly science-fictional perspective - partly covering enough ground to give the feeling, as in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, of really being aware it takes place on a whole planet, and partly also that Burgess seems to be able to take a step back from cultural assumptions and look at them from different angles in a direction rare in mainstream writing, which is greatly to the book's advantage. My highest recommendation.

writing: Armageddon Dreams

rysmiel@gmail.com — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 04:54:26 GMT

IX.3 (Xandryn): 2662 words. Done.
IX.4 (Apollyon): 1538 words. Done.

IX total: 12,142 words.

That was something of a surprise; what I thought was IX.3 became IX.4 and what I thought was a brief intro to IX.3 became an entirely new chapter; and this still leaves me with half of what I thought was IX.3 to do, and some reshuffling of the next few bits will be needed to handle that. It is however flowing and feeling good to do and I am learning yet more new stuff - another scene that goes between what I thought were the last and second-last chapters, which may or may not be a chapter of its own. And I have now got one secondary thread resolved completely. Yay endings.

consider a cubical monkey.

rysmiel@gmail.com — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:09:09 GMT

The new VNV Nation album is awesome. Furthermore, unlike every previous album of theirs, I am finding it awesome on first listening.

In news which might not be entirely unrelated, daharyn is a Hero of the Revolution.

I am going to stock up on a bit more awesome cheer and then go try to translate it into wordcount.

"...the recurring arguments between Sally and Ayn made Rand family dinners somewhat tiresome..."

rysmiel@gmail.com — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:59:42 GMT

It would be really nice if the severe thunderstorm watch would turn into an actual thunderstorm, because it's been pre-thunderstormy for longer than there's any need for. (Z said there was a storm yesterday afternoon, but I missed it.)

We just had a power cut which took down our development server, because $sysadmin has not yet got a replacement battery for its UPS so the thing is just plugged into the wall, and hence have had to go back a step in the population of Louse for the nominally end-of-August release.

I have just eaten probably the most boring chocolate-oatmeal cookie I have ever had in my life, and a strong contender for the most boring cookie of any description; it was most like unto something with which one would stick wallpaper to walls.

I am rereading Lest Darkness Fall. This at least is cheering.

growl

rysmiel@gmail.com — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:38:21 GMT

Transformers 2: among the five worst movies I have ever seen, way below bad enough to be enjoyable.

New VNV album; according to the computer in HMV released in Canada on May 28 and already sold out.

Home net; still a pig, if slightly less of one.

The only not-online moments today worth having were being in the right place and time to hold a heavy metro door for a particularly small and frail-looking old lady and being complimented on my thoughtfulness, and poutine in Reuben's.

magic internets, make up my mind for me

rysmiel@gmail.com — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:40:39 GMT

Do I want to go see Transformers this evening ?

Bearing in mind that what I really want is to go see Transformers last Tuesday when I was in the perfect mood for it, and time travel is not an option available to me at the moment.

wail of summer

rysmiel@gmail.com — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:10:30 GMT

Yesterday's happy joyful trip downtown to take advantage of the public holiday to go to HMV and buy the new VNV Nation album (released on Tuesday) was spiked by HMV being closed for the public holiday.

Yesterday's attempt to get writing done was not just a failure to produce anything useful, but a failure of the sort that leaves one seriously doubting why one does this in the first place.

Yesterday's arguments with Z on the continuing theme that there being a clean glass and a clean plate in the house does not mean washing up does not need to be done was also not mood-helpful.

Yesterday's total unusable slowness of home internet connection very much also a minus.

Yesterday night's drastic lack of sleep also did not help. Nor did not being able to find my metro pass this morning. Nor does $programmer being out sick today.

I think that bids fair to have been the single most useless day's "holiday" I have ever had. I did some washing up myself, and washed a load of clothes, and that was it.

work: internal communication oops

rysmiel@gmail.com — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:29:51 GMT

To simplify more than a little, one of the things I have been kicking in work recently is a complicated query function, with which three different things turned out to be wrong, one of which is "hardware is old and getting a bit finite for rate of growth of dataset". Some of the classes of result this function returns we have been texting and fixing on a case-by-case basis.

The opportunities for misunderstanding brought on by writing "all fixed" meaning "the option for retrieving all of the things you have queried is fixed" rather than "all the possible query options have been fixed" will probably be funny in retrospect.

weekend, Fringe and stuff. Lots of stuff.

rysmiel@gmail.com — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:18:59 GMT

Friday night I went to two Fringe shows. At 17.45 in the Just for Laughs studio space, Berkoff's The Secret Love Life of Ophelia, which is a slice through Hamlet as the correspondence between Hamlet and Ophelia, before and during the play; with Hamlet's rejection of Ophelia and antics at the play-within-the-play as both of them acting for other people's benefit. The text is wonderful, Berkoff's blank verse and playing around with some of the imagery from the original really feels like it could fit in the interstices, and it does very effective Shakespearean eros. The actors, Alicia Novak and Darren Boquist, were generally very good, modulo a couple of places where NorAm pronunciations threw the scansion off. The staging... was unfortunately reminiscent of the bit in Jesus of Montreal where they parody the Comedie Francaise. Lots of slo-mo and exagerratedly stylised gestures; how much that's in the text I don't know, it was certainly a feature of the Berkoff-directed Salome I saw in Dublin in the early 1990s so it may just be Berkoff's thing, but I did not like it then and I do not now; also, background music should not drown out the actual lines.

It turned out that the street fair on St. Laurent was this weekend, and in poking around in various of the stalls I found myself a copy of Hudson Hawk on DVD, yay. Now all I need is the first McG Charlie's Angels and my collection of great bad movies will be complete.

Then at 8 pm at Mainline there was Dracula in a time of Climate Change, a play unfortunately lacking in programmes so that I am scraping other reviews off the net to find out who the actors were. This is a surprisingly faithful, at some levels, contemporary comic redaction of Dracula, in which Lucy Westenra is an environmental science Masters' student going to Romania on an exchange program, welcomed to the creepy old house of Mr. Dracul, who greets her offer of an organic smoothie with "I do not drink... celery", and who is motivated by the sweetness of her vegetarian blood to come to Montreal. Scott Kettles' Dracula and Susannah Jones' Renfield make a wonderful double act, the former eschewing excessive camp for a perfect straight man, uncomprehending at all the right levels, and the latter brilliantly combining manic glee with a puppyish unrequited yearning for "the Master". The environmental activism stuff teeters on the edge of too unsubtle, and mostly works; the local references are to the point but not to the extent that it wouldn't travel. (Taking Renfield to the Insectarium; bad idea.) All in all, a very great deal of fun.

Saturday, then, I had a long phone conversation with my mother, mostly about the sudden forward motion on my parent's complicated two-house situation which appears to involve having made the houes on what was my grandmother's land a great deal closer to livable in (since I was there in March) and carrying out major floor-ripping-up-type structural work on the house they have lived in this past nearly thirty years. Also chatted with daharyn, yay ! And later that afternoon watched Ang Lee's Hulk again; I definitely think the infelicities (if you have a perfect origin story laid out in the credits don't spend the next half-hour redoing it; tantalisingly too little inside Banner's mind; and let's just forget the gamma-mutated poodle entirely) are outweighed by the virtues (Eric Bana; Nick Nolte; the Sam Elliott part actually played by Sam Elliott; understanding the scale at which to put one's cameos; Ang Lee's knowing how pacing works; and while it may not succeed at being Sophocles for superheros, at least it is trying something different.) Then Saturday night was Prairie Fire's Burlesque Unzipped, a discourse on the history of the burlesque show in a form approximating to a burlesque show; rather much for one person to tackle, but it had its moments, particularly the bits about the social context of the can-can.

Sunday I was up and out early for me to meet inamoratakitsch and friends for dim sum, which was a lot of fun; and then went back home and did some of the occasional cleaning jobs best done in papersky's absence, such as moving the dryer to clean the accumulated fluff out from behind, and moving the bed to brush underneath; wrote all afternoon, watched Shoot 'Em Up again in the evening, and got to bed relatively early for me which was A Good Decision. I may or may not go out and do something with inamoratakitsch and company again tonight depending on whether I hear from them; the impression I have is that they are very much improvising their way around but having a great time anyway.

writing: Armageddon Dreams

rysmiel@gmail.com — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:14:01 GMT

IX.2(Malcolm): 4046 words. done.
IX.3(Xandryn, still adrift): 1553 words, not done.

IX in total: 9495 words.

it is a curiously settling thing...

rysmiel@gmail.com — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:30:21 GMT

...when one has not done any serious programming in too bloody long, to take something on and get it done and tested and working in half an hour less than one's own estimate of how long it should actually take.

mixed bag

rysmiel@gmail.com — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:28:22 GMT

Good: Obama administration does another heartening thing, but one that's more personally so to me. Link c/o prince_corwin.

Bad: one of the problems with having a congestedy chest is that a dream about a friendly hug from a person one cares about and misses too easily morphs into a dream of said person unknowingly leaning their entire weight on one's chest and one wakes up more than a little short of breath.

Ugly: the guy talking into the phone as I was on the way to the Metro, repeating in increasing frustration the number he wanted the person at the other end to take down; which he was saying as "quatre-two-eight-huit". That does not seem to promote ready comprehension no matter who is on the other end.

Just Plain Weird: it appears that being overtired and faintly sick is one way of kicking the putting-the-plot-of-the-end-of-the-book-together bit of my brain into overdrive. I think I have noted down every idea that's come to me in the past twelve hours or so, and I hope they stay good when I look at them again.

this is the dawning of the age of vicarious

rysmiel@gmail.com — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:22:19 GMT

I am all coughy and spluttery and not happy about it, today. Work; slightly smarter about the feared deathmarch than feared, but still not fun.

Happy birthday shweta_narayan ! *hug*

Saw the free premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead on Tuesday. It was fun in a very light comic sort of way, with vampires running a theatre doing a strange Hamlet-based play that's not really more than a tiny bit Hamlet-like, a secret society of Rosicrucian-and-Guildenstonians, and a set of rules about why and how vampires would do a Hamlet-like play in the first place that all concerned acknowledge are as arbitrary as not liking garlic.

Video of some free-form gymnasticsy things that make me suspect this person was bitten by a radioactive spider. Link c/o pegkerr.

Trailer for the WH40K Space Marines video game. Link c/o ashbet.

i have cleaned up my study and done a large pile of kitchen cleaning, but being this spluttery seems to contraindicate moving the bed to brush the floor beneath, and moving the dryer to clean behind and beneath that, both of which will not be easy on the breathing.

Fringe: penumbra and The Importance of Being Earnest, and cool things forthcoming

rysmiel@gmail.com — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:50:46 GMT

Last night we saw two plays in the same venue, one at 18.00 and one at 19.30.

penumbra, the first, is the first play written by Katharine Dempsey, a local author, and directed by Paul van Dyck (whom we have previously seen in a wide range of stuff from Johnny Canuck to Paradise Lost). It's a four-hander, concerning 17-year-old Constance [ Catherine Berubé ], her boyfriend David [ Christopher Moore ], and an older couple [ Michelle Boback and Howard Rosenstein ] whom she meets through Internet small ads and who turn out to be her neighbours. penumbra is certainly the gem of the Fringe so far this year; intense, intelligent, with a lot of thought having gone into avoiding the obvious cliches and simple resolutions this shape of story might fall into, and a clear focus on the thing that matters being respecting boundaries and agreements made even when they are distinctly non-standard. All four actors are excellent; Berubé particularly strikingly so as this is the first time I've seen her given so meaty a part. The stage design is simple and effective in ways suggesting that some of the people involved count Gravy Bath productions that we have also seen among their influences.

The Eyewitness Importance of Being Earnest was by contrast a charmingly traditional production in many ways. Also a four-hander with an all female cast, notably Nell Corrin doubling up as Cecily and Lady Bracknell, the first about as close to psychologically plausible as I've seen Cecily done and the latter solidly working at levels it's hard to make so well-known a character, and Dee Watson's nicely low-key and realistic Jack; this was a great deal of fun.

Also, Paul Van Dyck's solo Paradise Lost is playing in Monument Nationale between July 14 and 19, which means I get to see it with daharyn, yay!

Also also, as a chap in the audience for Importance of Being Earnest told us, there is a two and a half hour musical version called Bunbury (without, alas, an exclamation mark) being produced here August 10-15 for Pride Week; anyone coming to Montreal for Worldcon who is staying around for a few days afterwards and interested in seeing it should drop a line, we will probably put together a party to see it.

papersky has set off for Fourth Street today, and I made a good start by remembering to take the recycling out all by myself like a real grown-up; have to remember to water the plants every day, yet.

weekend: logistical oddities and some Fringe

rysmiel@gmail.com — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:49:51 GMT

Friday night's plan to see a play failed because I sat in the wrong part of the library and papersky could not find me and by the time we did find each other it was too late to see it, so we just went to a rather nice new Tibetan restaurant in the vicinity and then home. Saturday became overwhelmed with large-scale logistical management, such that we did not go out to any plays then either; instead of which we ordered in sushi, and I played some Civ, and despite sensibly stopping just a bit past midnight, then could not get to sleep until 3 am anyway.

Yesterday, though, we actually got out and about and went to a play; Eyewitness Theatre's Lysistrata, an all-female cast doing a mostly-rhyming modern English translation which generally worked well; inventive, lots of bawdry with a fair few inevitable hoary old chestnuts, and demonstrating versatility on behalf of all the actors. It did a tonal shift into wrenching eyewitness reports of the horrors of war, which was effective in and of itself, but going back from that to the low comedy was odd; I also find their filking of Abba's "Chiquitita" to have stuck in my head annoyingly much since. Then we wandered over to Fringe Central and got tickets for the rest of what we want to see, had cool drink, and decided to see one more thing in addition; so the plan is to see two shows tonight, penumbra at 6 concerning which we know nothing other than the director and one of the actors are people whose work we have seen and liked before, and then The Importance of Being Ernest also by Eyewitness. It feels a lot more genuinely Fringe-like to make a random selection of something concerning which we know nothing.

Last night I slept if anything worse than the previous night, so I am pretty shattered today; expect limited communication thereby.

pick up the things that don't belong, some day you'll need to borrow

rysmiel@gmail.com — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:11:09 GMT

There arrived yesterday in the post, a third or fourth copy of the form I was hunting the other week. How many times is it that history repeats itself before becoming farce ?

In re last night's dream: I suppose it does make logical sense that given that Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin do not age, they could eventually end up in an SFnal future, but I still didn't actually want to see Dune re-envisioned as a Nero Wolfe mystery. The parallels betweeen Wolfe and Baron Harkonnen both being fat and sedentary were hammered down way too unsubtly, and Archie grumbling about the sartorial inadequacies of stillsuits got old fast, even with Jimmy Stewart playing him.

(Also, it's nice when the character one is in a dream needs a drastic change of life and career, and finds one has one's RL skillset available as well. Arrakis Needs Bioinformaticians. Nitpicking about the availability of computers and the Butlerian Jihad waited until I woke up.)

I have now read all bar one of the Nero Wolfe mysteries; the last unread one, sitting on my inpile, is Too Many Women. This was not actually intentional, but this title not appealing to me on the grounds of the concept not making sense was amusing.

Stained Glass Wings

interestingly strange archaeological claim

film review: Moon

today would be a good day to dry

home alone again

a single chance prevails

like a weekend in the middle of the week

further things that do not help

also

better to light a sandal than to curse your blisters

books for May

writing: Armageddon Dreams

consider a cubical monkey.

"...the recurring arguments between Sally and Ayn made Rand family dinners somewhat tiresome..."

*growl*

magic internets, make up my mind for me

wail of summer

work: internal communication oops

weekend, Fringe and stuff. Lots of stuff.

writing: Armageddon Dreams

it is a curiously settling thing...

mixed bag

this is the dawning of the age of vicarious

Fringe: penumbra and The Importance of Being Earnest, and cool things forthcoming

weekend: logistical oddities and some Fringe

pick up the things that don't belong, some day you'll need to borrow

growl