For those who wonder what I have against Europe, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Belgium is a perfect example:
Sophisticated Europe, where you can vote for any party as long as the cultural commissars approve of it. Otherwise, you’ll face sanctions, fines, & imprisonment.
It usually doesn’t snow here until winter, so a few flakes on Friday were unusual enough. Imagine my surprise when I woke this morning to find four inches of it on the ground. When it snows in the fall, all the leaves that no one has bothered to rake get frozen and then slushed into orange nastiness. But at least the snow was pretty, and appropriate for Dr. Deb’s Disaster Movie Night tonight. We watched The Day After Tomorrow.
Boston weather of the day: snow—actual snow!
Seema and I have been writing some bad, bad words as part of the NaNo rush, but I think my bad words are different from her bad words. For one thing, I haven’t used “cough” even once yet, never mind three times in the same sentence.
At this stage, my NaNo novel is an outline with passable dialogue (except for Jack phoning it in) and a whole lot of bad words where the stunning prose ought to be. The bad words are:
My characters need to do something while they’re speaking, so I toss in a bad word wherever I know actual relevant actions should be happening. Now I’m getting to the end of the story, where Snark Conquers Evil and our heroes ride off into the stargate together. And that’s where the trouble starts, because I have to go back and fill in some real action where my characters were just jumping around like crazy people.
Maybe I’ll do the descriptions next, instead.
Fic of the day: Wherever You Roam (SG-1, PG, AU), a short sequel to “A White Dove.”
I’ve always wondered why Emacs didn’t highlight my PHP code automagically. Today I was working on a site and decided enough was enough—I would find a way to get pretty PHP.
Fortunately, there’s a website devoted to this very issue: k-fish.de: Emacs & PHP. He said his favorite was the SourceForge PHP mode for Emacs project so I went with that. Here’s the .emacs code to autoload it:
(autoload 'php-mode "php-mode" "Yay PHP" t)
(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '(".php$" . php-mode)
auto-mode-alist))
(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '(".phps$" . php-mode)
auto-mode-alist))
Today is that magic day when a third of the novel is complete. My plot is almost done; soon I’ll need to go back and add the setting. I’m writing in layers, with the dialogue and clunky screen directions first. I wonder if I’ll be able to keep up my current pace once I go back to the beginning and start adding quality to my quantity. Quality takes time.
I’ve had another difficulty nanoing; Bitter!Jack the Muse has been reluctant to come out and snark. Daniel is going fine, and Sam and Teal’c are out of character for plot purposes (my nefarious scheme to conceal the fact that I can’t write either of them), but Jack just isn’t as snappy as usual. I think it comes from watching too much season 6. Jack is phoning it in and the muse isn’t getting enough material to inspire snark.
Maybe I’ll back up to season 4 for a while—the Best of Jack.
Hello Kitty link of the day: Hello Kitty Laptop (with fuzzy pink mouse)
A few more links to dump:
[Update] And how could I forget? VLC 0.8.0 is out. I’m downloading it now.
The title is from Brent Simmons, who encourages his fellow Democrats to buck up and get back to the beginning. He’s still a bit political for someone who makes his living selling stuff to people of unknown party affiliation. He says, “I think that winning an election by scaring people with gays is immoral.” Allow me to translate that as 51% of NetNewsWire users are homophobes. (See my previous entry for more about the translation.)
SFF.org has more to say about the nonsensical ravings of lunatic minds: “These Internet fantasies about how evil democrats are and how evil republicans are are getting out of hand.” The candidates weren’t all that different. Most notably, they agreed on the allegedly divisive gay marriage issue. There’s no reason, therefore, to kill yourself over the election results.
Hello Kitty link of the day: Hello Kitty’s blog
Jade wrote a very restrained post on the general mockery of American voters (specifically of the 51% who voted for Bush) in fandom blogging circles. Since I live in Boston, I get to hear that sort of thing all the time. If people don’t know you’re Republican, they’ll say all sorts of things about the evil of the W and the poor fools far away in the Midwest who voted for him. It doesn’t surprise me (much) to see it on LiveJournal, too.
Here in Massachusetts, only 13% of voters are registered Republicans, so the casual attitude that everyone is anti-Bush has some statistical backing. No one expects my state to go red, ever. It’s socially acceptable to mock Bush and to make dire predictions about his second term that, back in Peoria, would play like the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind. Such is life in Boston.
But when addressing Americans in general, the basic assumption should be that 51% of us are pro-Bush (or at least 51% of those responsible enough to go out and vote). So it’s odd to see people talking like they’re in a virtual Massachusetts when really, they’re in a virtual Ohio. There’s no way to tell which sort of voter you’re talking to online without prior knowledge of their political opinions.
I’m on the no-call list here in Massachusetts (and thus the federal one), but I still get calls from telebeggars, politicians, and other organisms that have rushed in to fill the environmental vacuum left behind by the telemarketers. So I still have some use for this highly entertaining EGBG anti-telemarketing counterscript. It’s available in several languages.