Oh shit, what if I like Fleetwood Mac?
Update 2223 hrs: Oh, okay, what if I just like Lindsey Buckingham?
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I’ve been off the crutches for a week and a half; today is my first day at work without the air cast. It’s been just over four weeks since I sprained it. A lot has happened since then!
I have a little lingering soreness, so I’m not sure if I’m going to keep the cast off or not this week. It’s not crippling, though, and MAN is it nice to actually wear a shoe on that foot. (I’ve been wearing a fetching black-shoe-on-one-foot, sandal-with-white-sock-on-the-other combo that gets me approving nods from the other crazy people on the street.)
The Grimbles was so good you have no idea. PHILISTINE.
Adam Burke is making comics again! After he finished The Incredibility Machine storyline in The Grimbles, I thought he was finally gone forever: washed away like ash in an electron tide, an early-adoption sharecropper on whatever plot of cloud is reserved for webcartoonists done good.
But he’s not!
Wow, Kelly Link’s first story collection is out there for free under a CC license! That’s only served to guarantee I’ll buy a print copy. And Small Beer Press, by which she’s published and which she helps run, is working on adding ebooks sans DRM. Man!
Kind of getting a hero-worship thing for Kelly Link.
Saved from an LJ comment feed, because Will asked. I don’t think I’ve ever explained Movie Pong here before.
Movie Pong!
In Movie Pong, which is normally played in groups of three or more, one human names a movie. The human to his or her left names an actor who appeared in that movie, and the next human along names a different movie in which that actor appeared, and the next a different actor who was in the second movie, et cetera. (You can also start with an actor, it’s just simpler to explain this way.) It’s better to play with odd numbers of humans, so that each player has to name both actors and movies.
If you can’t name a movie or actor when you’re up, you can challenge the person who went before you. If he or she can’t name one either, you win and he or she gets a strike; if he or she can, you get a strike. Three strikes you’re out.
If you play Movie Pong with DC, you will lose, but you might learn something. I suspect that Scott is the same way.
Using IMDB is cheating, but permissible for resolving disputes. Using the Oracle of Bacon is always illegal.
A variation I much prefer is Team Movie Pong, in which a group of humans work collectively to try and make a Movie Pong chain from one actor to another. It’s usually easy to do in seven links (Actor 1, movie, actor, movie, actor, movie, actor, movie, Actor 2). The challenge is considered won if the group can do it in five. Doing it in three is considered a mighty feat. Obviously, the more disparate the actors, the grander the accomplishment.
Just Letters: a Flash game that, as Ben said when he linked it, is “like the Internet in microcosm.” It’s difficult to get anything actually spelled out; it’s easiest to find the letters you need to steal in other people’s words, and vice versa. There’s a paper to be written in there about systems and recombinant entropy. Or maybe about memes. I couldn’t finish XORPH DOT COM or NOT ENOUGH VOWELS, but when I started sorting letters by color I had a dozen people helping me within ten seconds.
Earlier entry explained
Almost my entire extended family on my mom’s side–the Dixons & Company–went to the Ohio Renaissance Festival as a crew of pirates, in full costume and character. There were forty-one of us. Some of the grownups started drinking at nine in the morning. The Dixons don’t actually drink very often, but when we do we are Catholic about it.
They knew we were coming, but I don’t think they were quite prepared.
There was a lot of shouting and ARRing and attempting to sing shanties to which we had managed to learn about one line each. The first of many attempts to break into song came as we crossed under the portcullis to enter the festival proper, and it went like this:
“Well the ship set sail with a lusty crew
ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL
The hmm a grr and rum da dum
ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL
And they all got something mumble barnacles
ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL
ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL
What’s the one about the cabin boy? Let’s sing that one.”
I am not kidding when I say costume and character, either. We all had handmade outfits courtesy of my aunt Lea and my cousin Jerusha, plus jewelry, flintlocks and cutlasses. Sneakers were not permitted. We were the crew and wench-brigade of the Slime Dragon, under command of Cap’n–no, Adm’ral!–Lice. When Queen Elizabeth I made a personal visit that afternoon, she was quite impressed with our display of fealty.
There were vague-but-fervent plots of mutiny and assassination all day, but–just like with real pirates–it’s tough to stay on track with drunk ringleaders. It was like the world’s least-organized LARP. I just tried to keep afresh of the prevailing wind, and I gave some money to the poor stage juggler after he endured a good deal of the crew yelling that wasn’t handling enough blades.
It should be noted that this was not a spontaneous occurrence. In addition to an extraordinary amount of planning and effort by my uncle Jeff’s family, we have a shared pirate-story canon as documented by multiple home movies dating back to the late Sixties. Though those scurvy dogs were also led by a Cap’n Lice, yesterday’s crew was missing several key members and had gained a number of new ones. It also seemed to be rooted in a different time and place. Perhaps this (sea-based) Cap’n Lice was an ancestor of the later lake-based one?
Anybody who wonders why I became a drama major and a role-playing nerd doesn’t have far to look for an explanation. The same goes for my fervent belief in art as commons and shared creativity. And pirates. My family is amazing.
Not Katrinablogging
“The music on the tape loops and looped. It was going round for a second time. We sat and listened to it. We’ll be sitting and listening to it for a while longer.”
Everybody needs to buy Magic for Beginners right now and read it because I need a discussion group to figure out what she is doing with tense, dammit. Or you can borrow my copy. You can’t borrow my copy! I’m reading the title novella to Maria and I have to read all the stories in it again anyway.
At its worst (“The Cannon”) the book descends into playful postmodern nonsense, but at its best it’s glorious. It may be less glorious to people who don’t share my borderline ADD.
The story I quoted above (“Lull”) is kind of about time travel, so maybe the tense ambiguity is tied to that, but it also shows up in at least one other story (“Catskin”) which is a fairy tale and not about time travel at all. But there are two distinct stories about zombies.
I need you to read this book so we can talk about it!