Month: March 2016

51589

Pleural effusion is the phrase of the day.  If you’re replacing somebody’s damaged lungs from the inside out, you are going to get lymph.

Lymph lymph lymph.

I am going to a web festival this weekend. (It’s about generating content and being involved with broadcasting creative content via the web, and a lot of it is local which will feed into the stuff I’m doing on the novels.) I am going to live tweet it and blog about it as well.  It will be interesting to get up and go to it every day as if I was going to work! It also goes late at night so I’m probably going to be a conzombie.

50860

Went to my room at 4:30, crashed instead of taking a nap, woke at 2 am feeling wonderful.  This is an improvement.  I’m STARVING though, so I think I’m going to walk down to the convenience store and get some SUPPLIZE. Wrote a little but not much.

Hope everybody has a lovely and productive day!

 

50760

Home to Burnaby today. Bengal farewell was wonderful. Getting off the bus in the wrong place and walking home through darkened Saanich was interesting, specially half in the bag as I was. (Power was out). Then I get back to the fOlks’ and can’t sleep, tossed and turned. Got up late (obvs) and now I am contemplating stuffing everything back in my bag and driving Alex and Katie home.  Alex needs to have a trip that is one day shorter next time; he blew an invisible fuse and has been cranky past words this am.

COFFEE GOOOOD.

Andrew did it again (filk of This land is made for you and me)

This land is your land
This land is my land
From Obama’s White House
To the Hawaiian Islands
From the Sound of Puget
To the sound of silence
This land was made for you and me

Amid all the shrieking
At the bottom of the valley
I heard people speaking
Outside the big rally
They had been kicked outside
By the people inside
So–outside was made for you and me

This land is your land
This land is my land
From Wyoming brisket
To the apple pie land
From the Boston chowder
To the Cajun style land
This land was made for you and me

As I was walking
Your land and my land
I met a man whose
Job was sent to Thailand
He said the inmates
Ran the asylum
I said, the asylum was made for you and me

This land is your land
This land is my land
From the bells of freedom
To the FBI land
From the down and dirty
To the pie-in-the-sky land
This land was made for you and me

They sent Trump supporters
To follow our journey
They said when they caught us
We’d leave on a gurney
But when we were done with them
They canvassed for Bernie!
Our side was made for you and me!

This land is your land
This land is my land
From Appalachia
To the Sigma Chi land
From the Trump Casino
To the Blue-Tailed fly land
This land was made for you and me

As the season progresses
The movement of Trump’ll
Meet our solidarity
And it’s fury will crumple
As they come in swinging
Our hearts’ll be singing
“This land was made for you and me”

This land is your land
This land is my land
From the high and mighty
To the random guy land
From the Iowa Caucus
To the Fourth of July land
This land was made for you and me

50091

I did not make word count, but I wrote some memorably awesome medical type stuff and got early morning greetings from Alex and Katie, so what could I possibly want from this life?

Bengal Lounge farewell tonight.  I will bus there and back again – the bus that goes by my fOlks’ house goes straight to the Empress….

49028

Ah, rewatched CQB.  I caught a bunch of things – all tiny technical things that just make it SO GOOD – that I didn’t catch during the first glorious watch, when I was on the edge of my seat with excitement and happiness and terror.

Why do I ever stop taking vitamin D? I feel better right away, and the sleep is more solid although not long enough, as always.

I love my virtual friends

To the tune of Home on the Range.  Starting with Bucky Fuller’s quote from Heather S.:

Let architects sing

of aesthetics that bring
Rich clients in hordes to their knees;

Just give me a home,
in a great circle dome
Where stresses and strains are at ease.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Within minutes…. the next response.
Edward G.
Dome, dome with no strain,
Where the vectors of force are in play …
Where seldom is found
Such a structure so round,
And where four pi r squared equals A !

Then the ever remarkable Tim Griffin, minutes later, which I think is FUCKING BRILL.
Oh build me no pile in postmodernist style
For it’s ruder than Tudor by far
And the worst on the street is the house of concrete
I’ll not brood where the brutalists are!

No, I’ll hang up my reins where geometry reigns
Where the lightness and brightness prevail
Where I’ll not be ashamed that each panel’s the same;
Equilateral tri’s tell the tale!

48542

I am mucking about with pluripotent stem cells and biocompatible carbon nanotube lattices.

Jeff and I loved the first season of The Expanse so much we are re-watching it the instant we finished it. Up next, the episode CQB, which has some of the best and most realistic “fighting in space” sequences ever made for television, and a memorably grisly and arresting shot of the consequences of taking a railgun round to the, er, person when the gravity is acting up. If you’re squeamish, give this one a miss. And when we are done with the rewatch, we have to wait until 2017 for more. Favourite line of the show so far from character ‘Amos’ as he’s strapping autodocs onto two fellow crew: “You guys are really messed up, it keeps trying to put you in hospice.”

Honestly, that sounds like a line I’d write, so, hellyeah I like it.

47923

Joan Jett concert tonight with Mike, lunch today with Katie.  Thinking of renting a car to come to Victoria next weekend as the Bengal Lounge is closing and there is going to be a meeting of drunken lefties there and I’d like to see J. and the new kitties.  Plus my mother.  I can’t find the manuscript for the second book, which is crazy making, but it hasn’t left the house so I’m not worried.

It is possible but unlikely that I will bring offspring to Victoria but nothing is for sure.

Interview went well but there are many candidates.  Sounds like the church is a lot better at being a church for all nations than Beacon ever was.

Margot just came in and I put her in the window for a good view, and she actually stayed there and looked around for a while.  Buster watched cat videos with me the other morning.  He does that occasionally; he comes into my bedroom and ‘assumes the video watching position’ which is adorable. He is an extremely catly cat, and we loves him. Margot is just a pleasant fur generator by comparison, but she still has enough personality to make it interesting.

47449

Found a couple of new shows, Bosch, which is a police procedural set in LA starring Titus Welliver and a whole slew of other grads from good shows, and The Expanse, which takes gritty in-system space opera to new and interesting heights, also, depths. My tax dollars at work, yay!

 

46252

Great day writing yesterday, despite the fact my cold seems to have come back or whatever the hell it is; chills and large variations in how hungry I was. Missed dinner with J. and Shad, dang.

I have no idea if I’ll write that much today, but I’ve got a couple of chapters open, so we’ll see.

 

The hardest parts of these novels, so far. 1. Not using gendered slurs. 2. Gender nonconforming character using plural pronouns (more difficult than I could have originally conceived, and will have to be poofread with ludicrous amounts of effort). 3. Having the person I’m writing the books for ask me to improve the outcome for a character and I’m so indulgent I’m doing it, which is resulting in interesting wrinkles. 4. Not using religious swearing of any kind (except for one character, for humorous effect) and writing abusive language without recourse to any of the normal go-tos, for example, not being able to use the word ‘crazy’ Honestly, try getting by without crazy! I’ve had to invent some bizarre phrases to try to cover ‘crazy’ without being ableist. 5. Writing about the interaction between local First Nations and aliens without cultural appropriation (essentially having to erect a literary and legal firewall).

Most fun parts: working various filk songs into the narrative, a phony Reddit AMA that was a gas to write, using 30 years of Paul nattering on at me about aviation, specifically ridge lift and gliding, and planning how I’d take over Vancouver without invading it, if I was an alien. It’s all in the social engineering, but who do you approach first and why?

 

No progress

I read the on line five part 9.0 earthquake in Portland future history so you don’t have to.  IT IS SO FULL OF ERRORS, VERB TENSES NOT AGREEING, TYPOS and sentences which do not make any logical sense, please don’t read it until that guy has had a chance to fix it.  All of it.  His editor should have an autoerotic asphyxiation near miss.

I made up a word in German yesterday and it got more retweets on twitter than practically anything I’ve ever done there.  Airport grief beer (expensive shitty beer) is the translation.

I swapped out my mattress yesterday.  I am now sleeping on foam again. The other mattress had enormous divots in it.  Don’t buy floor models, yeah I’m dumb.  I had a restful night of sleep and am now contemplating with nerveless misery shoving everything that came off the top bunk back into corners.  The urge to just set it all on fire is rather large.

Time for some coffee.