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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
esther_a's InsaneJournal:
| Thursday, February 11th, 2010 | |
| 1:59 pm | It must be a slow day at work. A couple of the techs went past my office earlier, carrying a vacationing co-worker's desk. ETA: And now they are putting up caution tape and warning lights where the desk was. This entry was originally posted at http://esther-asphodel.dreamwidth.org/18 Current Mood: amused |
| Friday, November 13th, 2009 | |
| 12:18 pm | So, the Archive of Our Own starts open beta tomorrow. If anyone wants an account without waiting in the signup queue, I have an invite code up for grabs. Just leave me an email address, comments are screened. This entry was originally posted at http://esther-asphodel.dreamwidth.org/17 Current Mood: cold |
| Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 | |
| 10:39 pm | Currently in day four of a wretched cold. You could track where I've been by the trail of cough drop wrappers. This entry was originally posted at http://esther-asphodel.dreamwidth.org/17 Current Mood: coughing |
| Friday, November 6th, 2009 | |
| 7:00 pm | This is the sort of thing I have to deal with at family gatherings. Warped Uncle: "You can't tell that it is the end times until you have been kissed by a South American camel." Everyone else (with pained expressions): "Why?" Warped Uncle: "Because it's the alpaca-lypse." This entry was originally posted at http://esther-asphodel.dreamwidth.org/17 Current Mood: amused |
| Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 | |
| 3:13 pm | In other news, we finished entering the main nonfiction shelves into librarything. 9,469 books total, 2459 nonfiction. Glad I passed that part off to Mom. Now its just the last shelf of local cookbooks and the wall of books in the sewing room. (Plus the rest of J's shelf of kid books). The original estimate of around 10,000-12,000 books seems not too far off target, though a little low, there must be a few thousand more in the main craft section. This entry was originally posted at http://esther-asphodel.dreamwidth.org/15 |
| 2:52 pm | They are making a John Carter of Mars movie. \o/ I loved the Barsoom books when I was a kid. They are the exactly the sort of thing which I’ve always thought would be ideal for movie adaptations. It’s got airships and cool aliens and multi-limbed riding beasts, and most of the plot is action. And filming is in Utah, too, which is a great place to go for Martian-like landscapes full of twisty red rocks. I generally try not to have high expectations for movie adaptations of books, but as long as they manage decent special effects and watch the skeevy race and gender stuff in the source material, they hopefully won’t screw it up too badly. That should be managable even for Hollywood, surely? The books are very much a product of their times, the problematic stereotypes are not subtle. Admittedly, it’s being made by Disny/Pixar, which is a little unexpected. I’m curious what they are going to do on the costuming end. It’s a safe bet that they won’t be following the costumes as described in the book (i.e. jewelry and weapons holsters and not much else). Even the Frazetta illustrations tend toward the skimpy chainmail bikini look. Current Mood: cheerful |
| Thursday, August 13th, 2009 | |
| 8:22 pm | personal reminder post Well, John C. Wright is definately joining such company as Orson Scott Card, Will Shetterly, and Kathy Kramer on my Do Not Buy list. From the journal, his writing style alone is sufficent to discourage me from picking up any of his published work, but he is also a pretentious jackass. See him being a verbose homophobic fuckwit: ( cut ) Ditto for L. Jagi Lamplighter, who happens to be this loser's wife, courtesy of this bit of unrelated obnoxousness. Current Mood: annoyed |
| Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | |
| 6:17 pm | So, I had an exciting evening on Friday. First, the power went out, which is annoying enough at the best of times, and worse when you are house sitting for friends and don’t know where the flashlights are. So I went outside to try and figure out if it was just the house or a general blackout, and it immediately became obvious why the power was out, because the power pole across the street was on fire. A couple of clumps of grass around the base were lit up and the flames were starting to creep up the pole. Keep in mind that this is in New Mexico, far enough out on the edge of town that the neighborhood is technically part of the county, which means the climate is dry and there are large stretches of land with just enough plant life for grass fires to get going. So I dashed inside to get my cell phone and called the fire department. The couple across the street (who could tell there was smoke, but hadn’t seen the fire since it was just past the edge of their property and on the other side of a wall) had a fire extinguisher and managed to put it out before it spread much. The firetruck showed up pretty quickly and made sure it was out, and the power guys turned up pretty quickly after that and got the power back on, too. So it turned out okay, but I think I’ll wait ‘till they get back to tell my friends about it. I don’t think that a “Don’t worry, your house didn’t burn down” email would be the most reassuring thing in the world. I’m totally making sure I know where the fire extinguisher is the next time I house-sit, though. Current Mood: awake |
| Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 | |
| 12:53 pm | Yay! I finally finished adding all of the fiction books into Librarything. All, um, 6400 of them. No wonder it took eight months. Of course, there are probably about as many non-fiction books, but I'm not worrying about them yet. Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: Shiny Toy Guns, Stripped |
| Friday, May 1st, 2009 | |
| 5:37 pm | I've got some Dreamwidth invite codes. Comments are screened, so you can post an email address if you want one. |
| Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 | |
| 10:36 pm | History, you're doing it wrong This is what I get for procrastinating by reading old wanks from in the fandom wank wiki. If this post weren’t four years old I would want to argue with this person so badly. Even aside from her peculiar generalizations about “history fanfiction”, gems like this quote make me want to bang my head against a wall. “Well, could you legitimately call it historical fiction if the person that they are writing about is merely the name of a well-known figure taped onto some completely random person who is entirely not who or what that person was (and, in the case of people who are currently alive, who that person is), or if the events are extremely random and could never have taken place during whatever they are discussing (like a Civil War battle between the United and Confederate Sates in, say, New Mexico)? Historical fiction tends to base around something that could have happened in that time, not "hey, this is a name that everyone knows, I'm going to use his name for my character and have him go wage war in (country that didn't even exist at the time)!" Considering that there were, in fact, a number of battles fought in the New Mexico territory during the Civil War, this argument really doesn’t help the poster’s credibility. Perhaps someone should inform P. G. Nagle that her historical novels are “extremely random and could never take place”? I have heard of the state of New Mexico being mistaken for the country of Mexico before, but this is the first time that I have seen someone claim that we didn’t exist. Current Mood: cranky |
| Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 | |
| 2:34 pm | I have gotten too much entertainment from various peoples' mockery of Twilight to hate it, but I find the fact that it has turned into such a pop culture fad kind of bizarre. Twlight series author Stephenie Meyer broke with horror-novel tradition when she created vampire characters impervious to the sun. I think that this sort of comment is one of the more annoying aspects of the whole Twilight fad. It's just so utterly wrong. Stoker had Dracula running around in the daytime. The angsty "vegetarian" vampire protaganist is practically a stock TV character. The vampire hero as a vehicle for romantic wish fulfillment has been turning up in supernatural romance novels for years. The only thing SMeyer came up with that's actually new is the sparkling. Current Mood: grumpy |
| Monday, April 20th, 2009 | |
| 1:14 pm | apologies to anyone getting spammed Testing Dreamwidth cross posting. |
| Friday, April 17th, 2009 | |
| 2:07 pm | \o/ I got a Dreamwidth account: esther_asphodel. I'll probably end up crossposting. Its interesting to watch things being built from the start, although I am looking forward to a few more styles being finished. Current Mood: bouncy |
| Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 | |
| 9:51 pm | I vote that we pronounce Syfy to rhyme with jiffy. So the Sci Fi channel is changing its name Syfy, and is being deservedly mocked for it all over the internet. Not that this is all that surprising. It's been obvious for years that the network is run by twits. Tactless twits at that. Check out six paragraphs down on that last link: “The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” said TV historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch Sci Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network. Suddenly, many of their programing decisions make do much more sense. |
| Friday, June 13th, 2008 | |
| 1:27 am | In honor of the incipient zombie apocalypse, I present the chilling tale of The Zombie Parrot |
| Friday, April 25th, 2008 | |
| 11:39 am | Apparently, lame plagiarism excuses are universal. The professor teaching the class on vampires that I’m taking was quite annoyed yesterday. One of the part time teachers on campus had tried to teach a class that followed a very similar outline, including the same set of very obscure sources. One of them was a movie called “The Addiction”, which isn’t even available in the USA. It turns out that she had taken the class before. My professor even got the “but it’s a compliment!” and “I thought you weren’t teaching it anymore” excuses. You would think they could be a little more creative. And no, finding something unusual to steal, like a class syllabus, doesn't count. |
| Friday, April 4th, 2008 | |
| 5:21 pm | There is a mutant anime rabbit thing in my office. The ears move, and it blinks colored lights and talks. It has a wireless connection, and the techs keep emailing it, and then it reads the message. It was complaining that coworker B kept touching it earlier. Allegedly, the boss got it, and he and the techs are using it to test some kind of networking thing. It's sort of cute, but deeply bizarre. ETA Apparently this is what it is: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electr Its like some kind of bizarre cross between an web connection and a furby. |
| Thursday, March 6th, 2008 | |
| 8:08 pm | Where's the spork? My film class just watched Andy Warhol's Dracula. All of a sudden, I find myself in much greater sympathy for Valerie Solanas. I find it difficult to believe that it's a cult classic. I mean, sure, there is a ton of gratuitous sex, lesbian incest, and obviously fake gore, but it still manages to be completely boring. It tries for funny and achieves random. I feel like I've been forced to read deliberate badfic for an hour and a half. If something is relying on deliberate attempts to be shocking, there probably isn't much to it beyond that. On top of that, it is one of the most blatant examples of "No, really, she'll succumb to your manly forcefulness, women like being raped" that I have ever seen in a movie. In short, THIS MOVIE SUCKS! Current Mood: annoyed |
| Saturday, August 4th, 2007 | |
| 5:53 am | Well, lovely. Yet another round of Strikethrough idiocy. Didn't they learn anything from the mess last time? I'm going to have to figure out how to back up my journal. |