Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

The management apologizes for the lack of content due to the twin distractions of turkey and NaNo. Today is approximately the 85% point of NaNoWriMo,

I’ve added more scenes to the novel for filler, since editing wasn’t increasing my word count quickly enough. So far I have a new opening scene, two alien sports events, and some Jack adventure (because the novel was low on Jack content). I’m hoping to finish early over the weekend, but I’ll probably be desperately typing until the last minute.

Free font of the day: Kontrapunkt

The management apologizes for yesterday’s lack of content. The web server was out to lunch. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog:

I had a surprise job interview recently, and if I get hired it will also be a surprise. The company sounds much more interesting than I expected, and the location is far superior to the usual place in the boondocks. It’s not the perfect spot (which would be right next to Filenes’ Basement downtown), but ‘twould do, ‘twould do.

Yesterday was the 66% point (33,333 words) for NaNoWriMo, but since I’ve been slacking this weekend I just got there today. That means I’m still days behind on my special take-Thanksgiving-off NaNo schedule, but there’s still hope for the novel. Many apologies to Jerie for slipping into the NaNo category. I’ll try to blog about something not restricted to NaNo:

Here’s some advice from 43folders on how to hack your way out of writer’s block. Under his category of Do something important that’s very easy, I highly recommend writing a synopsis of your novel. Mine has helped me to see where my characters are being passive or running around in circles.

So the question arises, when you get home at 1 am and have written 62 words all weekend, do I try to catch up, or do I go to bed? I’m leaning towards bed.

Via Improbable Research: Jarl Flensmark postulates that schizophenia is caused by high heels. Yet another reason to wear your Birkenstocks.

Give it a whirl: Google Scholar.

Just a few links:

• Via Todd Dominey: clientcopia - like funny tech support calls or pointy-haired boss horror stories. The HTML is bad (font too small, line breaks missing on the Top 20 Page), but the quotes are still funny.
• In Boston: the deadline is approaching on the cheap rates for Arisia, a Boston con.
• On Putting Students To Sleep: A Classroom Policy Proposal
• At GNXP, an interesting discussion of Shar’ia law in Ontario (mostly in the comments).
• Also from GNXP: speculation that the Hobbits were really just microcephalics

Warning: Spoilers for SG season 6.

I’m still stuck in Season 6 of Stargate SG-1. (I’m that far thanks to Jerie’s ceaseless efforts to spread the SG love.) “Disclosure” (617) was a frightful low, not just in the total absence of Jack but also with the Kinsey acting like a great big whiny brat. The government can’t make up it’s mind who’s running the Stargate program eps never work for me. I didn’t buy the logic of his whining to foreign ambassadors in order to get a domestic policy change. I also didn’t understand why the Thor ex machina worked here but not in season 7. The West Wing it ain’t.

So I was despairing in the desert of no Jack when I started “Forsaken” (618). And there was Jack! Looking back on it, I’m not sure it was all that great an episode. I just enjoyed the challenge of trying (and failing) to figure out what exactly was going on.

The real thrill was “The Changeling” (619). I’m not big into the Jaffa Rebellion arc—it’s just as clunky and cheesy as the NID Politics arc—but at least the Jaffa have an excuse for being cheesy. The Goa’uld made them that way. And they turn the cheese into something almost moving.

So I’ve come to expect Jaffa Cheese from the average Teal’c episode; Teal’c with lines makes up for it. Instead, I got Teal’c Decheesed, plus a mystery to figure out, plus pleasant lingering questions like:

1. Did Daniel actually do anything?
2. What happens now?
3. If Teal’c can speak colloquial English when he’s dying, why can’t he do it every episode?
4. How does he know so much about firemen, anyway?

Jack and Sam were phoning it in, but they were still cute as firemen. Jonas stole every scene he was in, as usual. Ascended!Daniel is a little too saccharine for my tastes, but I hear he’s descending soon. I’ll miss Jonas.

Today is the 25,000 word mark. I’m a little behind schedule, but overall the novel is going well. The first draft is complete, with an exciting action-packed climax in which the fecal matter hits the rotary air circulation device and alien excrement ends up everywhere. As requested by Jerie, I canned the volcano plan and went with the stealth ending, so only a few aliens got chewed up, stealthily.

The urchin that Rocky suggested adding managed to survive all the way to the end of the novel, although another urchin got himself chewed. The two urchins may merge into one during the editing process (under that literary law about not multiplying urchins unnecessarily). I’m tempted to edit now to get the events into better order, but overall I’m happy with my 60 or so scenes. They just need to be twice as long by the end of NaNo.

Rocky left me a poem in my comments, which revealed that my WP line-break fix was fixing a bit too much. I still need the fix for weird old Blogger and MT entries, but I didn’t want it “fixing” the linebreaks in comments.

So the line break fix is just replacing br=1 with br=0 in the wpautop function in wp-includes/formatting-functions.php. The trouble came up when my altered wpautop was loaded as a filter in wp-includes/template-functions-comment.php. I needed the old one there. If I really understood the functions, maybe I could have stuck a br=something into wp-includes/template-functions-comment.php, but I was just there to hack. So instead I made a copy of wpautop in wp-includes/formatting-functions.php, called it wpautopp, and changed the filter name in wp-includes/template-functions-comment.php to wpautopp.

It works, but upgrading to WP 1.3 is going to be a nightmare for me.