Doing It!

Posts from here and my old tech blog are being moved to quitesmalladventures.wordpress.com, and I have a snazzy new posting name!

 

I’ll probably shut these down eventually, so make sure, all two of my readers, to note the new site. 🙂

Blogsolidation!

So I have decided to tidy up and update my online presence a bit, as I’ve spent the past several years sort of wallowing in neglected blogs. I haven’t decided yet whether to fold this site into one of my others, and given that my old Vox blog and a Blogspot outing were previously folded into this one, poor old Twitchery is just not very organized at the moment anyway.
What Will Happen:

Some cleanup. Things will be tagged. Things may be edited. Posts may be deleted, not because I am some sneaky person who wants to Destroy The Historical Record Of Who I Was, but because they seem especially pointless or outdated.

What May Happen:

There may be a note in the next few weeks that this blog has been folded into another (probably my even more strenuously neglected Poor Man’s Lois Lane site) and will shortly be pining for the fjords.
At any rate, stay tuned..

Proofreader Brain

This is what it’s like to have Proofreader Brain: I found this infographic at the Ocean Conservancy’s website. It has lots of interesting/horrifying information about the trash we let in and near our oceans…and yet all I can think is “PUERTO RICO IS NOT A COUNTRY!”

The List Fantastic

NPR just released the results of a call for the hundred best sci-fi/fantasy books according to their listeners/website readers. I am sort of saddened that I’ve only read 15 of the outright books*, and honestly, didn’t like many of them (one of the two Terry Pratchett entries is also the only Pratchett book I have ever sold off).

Of course, it’s hard to calculate just how many to say I’ve read: entire series were granted one entry each, and of those, I’ve read:

• One book in the Belgariad
• Four in the Wheel of Time series
• About 12 Xanth books
• The first Dune
• Every damned Vorkosigan book. 😀
• The Fellowship of the Ring

Sometimes I think I’m just contrarian: even The Last Unicorn isn’t my favorite Peter S. Beagle book!

Helga

I have a spider living in my driver’s side mirror.

She (thanks to Charlotte’s Web, I tend to assume spiders are female) is ugly, brown, and very industrious. When she draws her legs up to her body, the entire assemblage looks like a very small head of Cthulhu.

She is also tenacious: when I first discovered her on Monday night, I took the car on the interstate in an attempt to shake her off. What I ended up doing was taking my spider on a lovely night tour of my city.

I had planned to squash her the next morning, but she was still in the mirror, hadn’t completely covered my door in web, and, most importantly, would make a real mess on any shoe employed for the task. So instead she gets to be called Helga, and I get to feel imaginary bites all over myself every time I look at her or think about her too much.

Headline Of The Day

I saw this on a local news feed. Someday, I’ll remember to make a tag for “things that don’t seem like news”:

Misspent social services funds point to problem

Er…yes?

In Which I Gain A Spine…Then Rant About It Being Broken

Note: While I could provide pictures, I’m not going to, because my object is not to shame anyone: this is an ongoing problem I have with buying used books online.

Dear Bookseller,

I just received my package from you, and I must admit I’m very concerned for your welfare. This book’s condition was listed as “Very Good.” There may even have been some talk about “minor edge wear.” These words, combined with the condition of the book on its arrival, suggest several possibilities:

1. You have recently been through some sort of apocalypse which affects your judgement of such things—maybe the condition of this book, as opposed to the garden ruined by that rain of toads, is indeed “Very Good.”
2. The fancy super-sealed packaging emitted fumes, causing you to hallucinate that this was not, in fact, a creased and spine-cracked travesty of a paperback.
3. You are totally, totally evil.

I’m not averse to a little work on these things, really: I know I’m demanding. My paperbacks are going to be clear-Contact-papered, after all, and sometimes buying a used book means that I take a Sharpie or some paint and touch up little spots here and there before I preserve it.

I preserve it because, in my cockeyed optimism, I assume it will be good.

You sent me this copy of this novel because you, in your cockeyed optimism, assumed that I was either apathetic, mentally blunted, or visually impaired. I’m no more whipping out a Sharpie for this than I am performing CPR on the mummy of Ramses II, and for exactly the same reason.

…I didn’t punt it off my balcony in a rage, either, though, so there is that.

Am I going to mention some of this in my review? Let’s just say the chances are “Very Good.”

Well, This Could Be a Problem…

This winter, I’ve tried to be proactive about that zombie state this time of year always seems to cause in me: I bought a SAD light and a space heater for my office, decorated for Christmas, tried to think of fun things to do in snow rather than just yelling at it out my window like Kirk in Wrath of Khan, and generally gave it my best effort. And a lot of these things have helped, especially the light.

Until today, when I realized that I’ve been much more energetic the past few days than I have lately. The difference isn’t temperature at work, or sunshine (real or false): it’s the temperature outside. Yes, just like my indoor cat floofs up for winter even though it never goes below 65º in his immediate environment, I apparently perk up when the temperature I don’t even spend most of my day in goes up. How the heck can I be proactive about that?

Et Tu, NPR?

I know I can count on Yahoo! for a …unique… approach to word usage, but I expect better from NPR’s book reviews. Instead:

“Writer Mira Bartok was 40 years old when a semi-trailer hurled into her car on the New York Thruway.”

The word is hurtled. “Hurl,” used in formal speech, needs an object: “She hurled an eraser at the book reviewer.”

The only reason “hurl,” needs no object in its slang sense is because it’s a euphemism—that is, used specifically to avoid mentioning the substance you, er, hurl when you hurl.

I’m no stranger to this kind of disappointment with NPR—it seems that eventually, apprise vs. appraise will cause me to lose respect for absolutely everybody in the whole world, until one day I flub it myself and the universe goes up in smoke—but I never expected something quite so gross.

A Conversation That Didn’t Happen

You have a fishie!
Yes. Adorable, isn’t he?

 

What’s his name?

Um…

You named him Jack McKoi, didn’t you?

…Yes?

How ridiculous. Fish don’t even have eyebrows!