Link rot alert, but the LJ-feed comments on my senses post are pretty great.
Category: Pulverbatch
I’m 25
I made brownie pie and we ate Spinelli’s. DC and Beth got me a book and a bunch of great Actors Theatre stuff, and Yale got me some stuff he found in his car, and he, Ken, Kyle, Scott, Lisa, Monica, Mom, Ian, Maria’s family and especially Maria got me a present I would never have let myself buy: a real camera.
Thanks, ballers.
It is fun to make pictures
Third monochrome image post in a row! This one actually serves a purpose: it’s a very rough (and lazily photoshopped) mockup of what I have in mind for the cover of the Anacrusis book.
Image credits: the human eye came from a really nice BY-SA macro shot called fóvea, and the bug eye from a BY-ND shot called drosoph. The latter makes me unhappy, because I’m clearly deriving from a NoDerivs work, but I can’t find the photographer’s contact info to ask permission. If you are the photographer, please write me! Oh, and also write if you have a strong opinion about the cover.
10,001 points
Saved from the LJ comment feed, here’s William’s follow-up to Winter:
Spring falls hard, sprawls awkwardly on the ground. “Goddamn it,” he mutters. Then louder, to the air in general, “this better not set a theme!”
Caleb helps him up, his face full of apology. Spring swats him away, muttering about ‘respect’ and ‘kids these days’. He brushes the dew from his trousers and winces.
“Are you okay?” asks Chyler.
Spring doesn’t respond: he’s just noticed the stains on his suit. He looks like he’s about to have kittens.
After about a second, they realise he’s forgotten they’re there. They hurry off, feeling slightly uneasy.
“Aw, man,” Spring mourns. “These were new.”
Sometimes, awesome things happen! One such thing is Mr. Andy H.’s timeline of the Holly stories, which is really more complete than it should be. I consider it totally canon (your personal canon may vary), with one minor exception: Holly and Rose aren’t trying on bras, exactly. More the opposite.
Thanks, Andy!
One of the hilariously demented* developers who works on this floor has recently posted a sign in his cube, which reads “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” I, being much cleverer and more handsome,** immediately thought “ah ha! This human has printed a corrupted version with the incorrect word order! The correct phrasing is ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here.'”
I was so certain of this because my version fits nicely into an iambic pentameter, while his doesn’t (you can make it fit, but that involves stretching a short vowel to a long syllable and vice versa). But it turns out neither of us was right: the Divine Comedy translation which spawned the phrase, by H.F. Cary, actually goes “All hope abandon ye who enter here,” which is much better and still in perfect iambs. Bah! Iambs are fickle! That’s why I support dactyls. Want to hear more about the Pro-Dactyl Initiative? Contact your local poet laureate today.
* Developer may be neither hilarious nor demented.
** I am very handsome and clever.
Reluctant openness
I don’t like talking about money, but here goes!
I am considering self-publishing an Anacrusis book: 101 of the best standalone stories from the last two and a half years, plus one (completed!) bad penny story arc. I would purchase one copy for myself, one for Maria, one for my grandmother and one for my mom. That’s all the demand I anticipate, which is why I’d be going with a print-on-demand company (likely Lulu) rather than an offset press with some kind of hideous minimum print run. I am not going to sell a thousand copies.
It would come in two versions: a fancy dust-jacketed hardcover, which I’d limit to 101 copies at $24.95, and a “viral edition” cheap paperback at $9.95. That doesn’t include shipping cost. I’d make a couple bucks off either, which I would put back into web ads, review copies, etc. I probably would not break even in the end, but it would be a relatively cheap way to raise my profile as a writer. Anybody who took the trouble to ship me his or her copy would get it signed and shipped back for free.
The chief goal of this project, though, would be to give people who like reading Anacrusis something tangible to show their friends. You might be one of those people. Do you want something tangible? Which edition would you prefer? Would it interest you more if the book came with exclusive content (eg ten new stories) or would it make you feel jerked around? (Everything would be released under BY-SA, as usual, so anybody who wanted could just repost them somewhere.)
I’ll be reading the LJ comment feed on this entry, of course, or you can spam me any time.
Brendan Talks About Things He Doesn’t Understand
Reading Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun, finally, I came across this sentence:
“Beauty is found in the tension between our expectations and reality.”
Which contrasts interestingly with Rebecca Borgstrom’s assertion that suffering is the disconnect between desire and reality (which, as I vaguely understand it, is derived from viparinama-dukkha and sankhara-dukkha).
That’s not to say that together, they imply that suffering is beauty; in fact, Borgstrom (who I think would not disagree with Koster’s statement) has specifically denied as much. Whatever I’m fumbling at here is more subtle than that. So why not crush the subtletly beneath our old friend proof-by-analogy?
According to our premises, beauty is derived from expectations and suffering is derived from desire. Sumana has said that hope leads to expectations, secret or otherwise; I believe that. I also believe that desire invariably produces hope. So desire leads to suffering and hope; hope leads to expectations; expectations lead to beauty; beauty leads to desire. Insert ASCII diagram here. Suffering is the byproduct of the desire-hope-expectations-beauty loop.
Or make up your own better diagram, and tell us about it.
Since I arrived here, our IT department has used XStop software to filter the naughty bits out of our workday. The only way it really bothered me was that it blocked the Onion (but left the AV Club unfiltered). I got used to it.
This morning we got an email informing us that they’d switched to WebSense, which has already proven to block nearly all my favorite webcomics, the Onion and the AV Club, IMDB and basically anything they categorize as “Entertainment.”
Awesome!
I assume the guys who installed this software (at the behest of the legal department–liability, you know) have passwords that will let them read Megatokyo; I’m sure they also know that getting around this kind of thing is startlingly easy when one has one’s own website. Then again, xorph.com is still listed as a webcomic in plenty of places. I wonder how long I’ll be able to keep tunneling out?
Update 1317 hrs: Oh, “Entertainment” has been unblocked. Cancel jihad, cancel jihad.
Kelly Link describes her stories as “kitchen-sink magic realism,” which I can understand, because the moment you say “fantasy” people think Robert Jordan and their ears shut down. Conversely, in her own words, “people hear ‘magic realism’ and they think ‘oh, like those Gabriel Garcia Marquez stories where people fly.'” (Everybody read exactly one magic realism story in high school, and that was it.)
Anyway, if I thought I could get away with it, I’d call Anacrusis “Kelly Link magic realism.” Look, it almost rhymes.