Just wanted to say Happy Halloween to everyone. Hope you all have something delightful planned. I will be in Phoenix tonight, and who knows what will happen? Perhaps something interesting, and perhaps something dreadful!
But if the zombies come out to play, at least I’ll be ready for them.
That’s right, I’m taking the 20lb Sledge down with me, goin’ brain-bashin’.
Or, not… you know?
I found my hat the other day… it was … well, I wouldn’t have been physically capable of locating it had I not moved several of the large pieces of furniture in my room around the other day. How it found its way there, I know not. Anyway, it had been missing for a few weeks and I’m glad to have found it.
Today while I was working on clearing off my table (it is very nearly clear) and then on Betty (I got about half the crust done, I need to do the other half still, and then on the actual Betty…), I watched Monsters Inc, The Mexican, Kung Pow, and Being John Malkovich. The first three with Director’s Commentary on, and the third without because… well, for some reason Spike didn’t do a commentary track.
I was having some instability issues with Jaguar, and I know I should probably have done a ‘clean’ install of Panther, formatting the HD and installing Panther on a fresh drive, but … that’s so much work. Backing up all my data, finding all the originals to re-install all my software… finding my serial numbers, etc… making sure I have everything I need… it could take days, and I wanted Panther installed right away. And Panther … well, I wasn’t tracking my problems in Jaguar, so I don’t know if it’s the same or more, but at least every time something crashes in Panther it reports it to Apple. Anyway, if it keeps it up, I’m going to get to work on moving things around and locating originals and serials so I can format and reinstall. My computer is coming up on its second birthday in January, so I figure it’s due for some work.
There are so many things I’m supposed to be doing… I’ve just been so out of it lately… I’ve got these two books (so far two; two more ‘in transit’ to my library, arriving any day now) on screen printing, but I keep setting other things on them so they stay out of sight. Every time I see them I think about screen printing and I start to get stressed out again. Every time I actually force myself to read more of them, it just makes me more informed and more stressed about the whole process. Every time I think about it all I remember that there are still zero pre-orders, zero actual interest in the shirts, and maybe it’s the economy, and maybe it’s the designs I’ve started with, and maybe … I don’t know, maybe my readers really don’t have any money. What if I offered the ‘Need Head’ design in white on black shirts? Or ringers? What about … Modern Evil logo’d black shirts? How about a black shirt with the stick-figure guy from A Stick Figure Comic on it in white, and some nihilist phrase? What if I developed a process to silk-screen images from my paintings onto shirts? Or whole paintings? Would you buy silk-screened, low-cost copies of my paintings? Or here’s an idea that Iain had a while back: A green shirt with white lettering, on the front “Make 7” and on the back “Fuck Yourself To Hell”. How about that?
Nevermind. I’ll just keep trying, anyway.
After watching The Mexican with commentary by the director (and others), Gore Verbinski, I popped in The Ring, thinking I might be able to get through it in broad daylight with commentary running instead of the normal soundtrack, considering I rarely look up at the screen while listening to the commentaries. Alas, there does not appear to be a commentary track on The Ring. Worse, just the images and sounds that passed before my eyes to get to the menu, and while I was looking through the menu to try to find the commentary, in the middle of the day in broad daylight, scared the bejeezus out of me. I keep getting the creeps, even hours later. Fuck. Which reminds me. Zoe: have you watched the copy of the ‘video’ I made for you yet? Good luck with that. Be sure to copy it yourself. Heck, pass the one I gave you on to someone unsuspecting. It’ll be fun.
NaNoWriMo coming up in a couple of days. Angela: the answer is paper. Write on paper when you’re at work, and type it up some other time, say … December or later. This causes a problem only when you go to try to get an accurate wordcount… but maybe you can get someone to type your pages up for you. How fast does Heath type? Maybe he’ll do it in exchange for … A trip to sooty San Diego! Or … something. Heck, if I get my novel done ahead of schedule (possible, considering I wrote the last one’s first draft in 8 days) I’d be glad to type your pages up for you.
As far as my own novel goes… I don’t know. I’m writing so much here every day, I know I could ‘keep up’ with a reasonable word count per day… but … What am I going to write about? I have two really good ideas for novels sortof queued up, and I could write a first draft or beginning draft for either of them right now and fill in the technical details later … or I could try starting from scratch on something off the top of my head and see where I end up… which was what worked for me last year. The ideas I had ahead of time or that I had any idea about structure for just… became stuck. I want to get this done again; last year I finished just under “the wire”, this year I’d like to get done ahead of time. Last year I was the Municipal Liaison for Tempe, AZ (and really for all of Central Arizona) – this year I’m over 100 miles from there and about an hour from the nearest fellow NaNoWriter, with no way to meet them if I wanted to (since I have no car of my own). Phoenix NaNoWriters are struggling right now because they have no ML, no leadership, they keep calling out, but no one has volunteered yet (last I checked) and no matter how much I want to help them out, I realize it would be fairly difficult from my vantage here in the hills. Worse, this year they’re restricting ML’ing to people who have done NaNoWriMo before, so they have people who understand how hard NaNoWriMo is without the extra responsibilities of trying to help out other writers and keep things together. I was an ML my first year in, and managed to arrange weekly-and-more meetings in Tempe despite my own multiple difficulties getting a novel written. This year I theoretically have more time available to work on either, but I’m hours away from the bigger part of the puzzle.
So I guess it’s just me and my novel. Which … I guess it’ll be two more days before I know where I’ll start, and 32 more days before I know where I’ll end up. I don’t have a laptop anymore, so I’ll just … take pads of paper with me to PHX/San Diego, and maybe work on the novel on paper, like I advised Angela to. Of course, I’ll type my own up … likely doing some re-writing as I go, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because while it’s more time consuming to write things twice, it’s moreso to think them out twice. But I’ll do whatever it takes. Some of my favorite bits of Lost and Not Found are the pages I was forced to write on paper because my laptop was dead.
I’ve finally got around to begin naming the days, weeks and months of my calendar. They are subject to change, but here you go:
Months:
1 – ichiember
2 – remember
3 – triober
4 – catember
5 – pentumber
6 – exober
7 – september
8 – october
9 – november
10 – december
Weeks:
1 – ichgo
2 – nigo
3 – songo
4 – chigo
5 – gogo
6 – rogo
Days:
1 – Sunday
2 – Monday
3 – Wensday*
4 – Thursday
5 – Friday
*Yes, I took that stupid ‘d’ and ‘e’ out of Wednesday, making it the easier ‘Wensday’, which is much closer to what people say, anyway.
I’ve just noticed that this is post eight hundred and one. I missed noticing 800. Oh well. Maybe I’ll notice one thousand. I’m doing some work on FYTH as I write this; I think there’s some problems with the Db for FYTH specifically – I get a lot of trouble adding new posts. Probably just something corrupted somewhere. I’m extracting all the data from the old one, scrubbing it, creating a new Db location for it, inserting it, and I’ll see what happens. I’ll probably go to bed soon though, so this post will be pre-fix, actually. I’ll take some time to do the fix tomorrow. Tonight I’m going to focus on staying warm.
I forgot to bring wood up to build a fire with, so tomorrow morning when I wake up and it’s forty-five degrees in my room, I won’t be able to do anything about it, at least until the sun comes up. Maybe I’ll ‘sleep in’ and stay in bed until it’s light enough outside to gather some wood. Bah. I’ll probably just put on some warm clothes (I wonder how they’ll stay warm in my dresser; the dresser will be the same 45degrees as the room) and ignore it. Or something. I’m so dumb. Tomorrow, on my list of things to do, should be to bring up some wood.
I’ve been writing here for over an hour now. I should probably go lay down and try to get some sleep before I write a fifty-thousand word post. Night.
So, I was working on straightening up my room and I came across this box full of envelopes… bills and pay stubs and bank statements and the like, and I thought I’d go through and sort it out and throw away whatever was unnecessary… Take everything out of its envelope to save space, all that.
And I found, just now, that I have every bank statement from January 1999 through last month, save the January 2000 statement. Where is it? How could I save every statement but one? I’m going to go ahead and file these away in my filing cabinet, but … that missing statement is vexing.
I only keep credit card statements and other bills for about 90-120 days, so I only have a few of those, but I tend to keep bank statements and pay stubs. I haven’t sorted through all my pay stubs and unemployment stubs yet, so I don’t know which, if any, of those are missing, but… I think I’ll probably throw away the stack of MicroAge pay stubs I found … and get out the rest of them (I actually do have all of them, and all my timesheets from MicroAge) and throw them all away. I left MicroAge in January 2000; I doubt I’ll need them anyway. Of course, I’ll hold onto all the tax-related paperwork, W-2’s, etc… They say three years for individual taxes and … much longer for businesses…
This part of cleaning up always takes longer than I expect. I’ve already been sorting out papers for two hours today, and I’ve not really put anything anywhere but in piles on the floor. Hopefully this will all come together soon and I can get to sorting through the more tangible items cluttering the table. And THEN I can get to work on Betty.
Betty, a painting that shall likely be a disappointment to all. Hooray!
I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, and I guess this morning I just finally crossed that line of “Do this now”. I made a spreadsheet, and I put in all the titles of my DVDs. I haven’t added other columns yet, though surely I shall fill many hours in November putting off writing my NaNoWriMo novel adding things like director, writer, etc… and figuring out that what I really need is a Db rather than a spreadsheet, so I can add all the actors and plot points &c. together into a cross-linked setup that will allow me, for instance, to watch all the movies I have where two people struggle and struggle to get together in love, only to have one of them die suddenly, without my having to think too much about it.
Anyway, I alphabetized it (oh-so-easy once you have it all typed up in Excel) and here you go, a list of the 243 DVDs in my collection:
12 Monkeys
200 Cigarettes
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
About A Boy
Abre Los Ojos
Adaptation
Adult Swim – promotional DVD
Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The
Adventures of Pluto Nash, The
Almost Famous
Amelie
American Beauty
American Outlaws
American Psycho
And All That Could Have Been
Animatrix, The
Anniversary Party, The
April Is My Religion
Apt Pupil
Army of Darkness – Bootleg Edition
Back To The Future
Back To The Future II
Back To The Future III
Bamboozled
Band of Brothers – miniseries
Bandits
Battlefield Earth
Beach, The
Being John Malkovich
Bicentennial Man, The
Big Hit, The
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
Birthday Girl
Blade Runner – Director’s Cut
Blast From The Past
Boogie Nights
Boondock Saints, The
Bound
Bourne Identity, The
Bowfinger
Brainwarp
Braveheart
Brazil
Bring It On
Brotherhood of the Wolf
Bulworth
Catch Me If You Can
Chasing Amy
City of Angels
Contact
Count of Monte Cristo, The
Crow, The
Crow, The – City of Angels
Crow, The – Salvation
Curse of the Jad Scorpion
Dark City
Dark Crystal, The
Demolition Man
Devil’s Advocate
Dinotopia
Drumline
Dune
Dune – miniseries
Edtv
Edward Scissorhands
Empire
Event Horizon
Evil Dead, The – Book of the Dead Edition
Evita
eXistenZ
Eyes Wide Shut
Family Man, The
Felicity – Season 1
Fifth Element, The
Fight Club
Finding Forrester
Fisher King, The
Forces of Nature
Formula 51
Forrest Gump
Forsaken, The
Four Feathers, The
Frailty
Frighteners, The
From Hell
Galaxy Quest
Game, The
Gattaca
Get Carter
Get Over It
Gladiator
Good Will Hunting
Gosford Park
Grosse Pointe Blank
Groundhog Day
Gun Shy
Hackers
Happiness
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
High Fidelity
Holy Grail, Monty Python and the
Holy Man
Hook
House of Yes, The
Hudson Hawk
Hudsucker Proxy, The
Ideal Husband, An
Illuminata
Insomnia
Intacto
It’s A Wonderful Life
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
Jeepers Creepers
Jerry Maguire
Joe Versus the Volcano
Joe’s Apartment
Johnny Mnemonic
Kate and Leopold
Keeping The Faith
Kissing Jessica Stein
Knight’s Tale, A
K-PAX
Kung Pow
L.A. Story
Labyrinth
Legally Blonde
Legend – Ultimate Edition
Legend of 1900, The
Lilo and Stitch
Limey, The
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
Lolita
Lost in Space
Magnolia
Majestic, The
Man On The Moon
Matrix, The
Meet Joe Black
Memento
Men in Black
Men in Black
Mexican, The
Minority Report
Monsters Inc.
Moulin Rouge
Mulholland Dr.
Mystery Men
Neverending Story, The
No Such Thing
Notting Hill
Novocaine
Nurse Betty
O Brother, Where Art Thou
Ocean’s Eleven
One Hour Photo
One True Thing
Original Sin
Others, The
Out Of Sight
Panic Room
Payback
Peter Pan
Phenomenon
Pi
Planet of the Apes (2001)
Pleasantville
Pollock
Pootie Tang
Postman, The
Practical Magic
Princess Bride, The
Punch-Drunk Love
Queer As Folk – Season 1
Queer As Folk – Season 2
Quills
Red Violin, The
Replacements, The
Requiem For A Dream
Reservoir Dogs
Resident Evil
Ring, The
Rob Roy
Rocketeer, The
Rocky Horror Picture Show, The
Romeo + Juliet (1997)
Rounders
Royal Tenenbaums, The
Rules of Attraction, The
Rushmore
Santa Clause, The
Save the Last Dance
Saving Private Ryan
Say Anything
Se7en
Serendipity
Shadow of the Vampire
Shakespeare In Love
Shawshank Redemption, The
Shreck
Signs
Sixth Sense, The
Sleepless In Seattle
Snake Eyes
Snatch
Solaris
Specials, The
Spiderman
Spy Kids
Spy Kids 2
State and Main
Strictly Ballroom
Super Troopers
Talented Mr. Ripley, The
Thin Red Line, The
Three Kings
Time Bandits
Time Machine, The
Truman Show, The
UHF
Unbakeable
Unbreakable
Van Wilder
Vanilla Sky
Velvet Hammer Burlesque, The – promotional DVD
Virgin Suicides, The
Waking Life
Walk in the Clouds, A
Waterworld
Way of the Gun, The
What Dreams May Come
What Planet Are You From?
Wild Wild West
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Wit
Woman on Top
Yoga Zone – Power Yoga
Yoga Zone – Total Body Conditioning
Yoga Zone – Yoga for Abs
Zero Effect
Zoolander
I say 243, though obviously Felicity Season 1 or QAF Seasons 1 & 2 are not on one disc each, and Yoga DVDs aren’t really movies… But that’s about right. I remembered that I have Abre Los Ojos borrowed out, and that the copy of The Green Mile I have here is Angela’s, not mine.
Anyone else have any of my DVDs, what I have forgotten I lent you? OoH! Art has my copy of The Frighteners. I’ll go up and add that to the list. I guess that’s 244.
Dial-up is a great, deep dungeon into which only a trickle of dim light can penetrate. It turns basic tasks into intense struggles against a seemingly immovable force. It puts me at a great disadvantage against foes with broadband as I attempt to place timely bids, and it cripples my ability to correspond in realtime.
Truly, this must be a shadow of Hell, fallen across my computer.