memorizingthedigitsofpi

THE LAPTOP IS HOME!

Turns out the problem was my VPN not playing nice with my wireless. The problem has been solved, all the drivers have been updated, and the laptop works again :D Now, maybe I can actually get a little writing done this weekend.

Current Mood: chipper

vriddy

The Cursed Witch post-beta editing is going slowly. Soooooooooooooooooooo slowly. Not because I'm not putting in the time! I've put in *checks* 18h31. Just for Chapter 2. Out of ten chapters. I've spent 43h51 on this round of editing so far, and I'm not even a quarter of the way through.

I can never write a story in this way again.

It doesn't matter that the changes do seem to be making the story better and more interesting (although I'm still concerned about pace). It's just hard to work on ideas I had 2 years ago when I have more ideas, concepts, life questions I want to dive into now. But mainly, if I'm aware of how much work is ahead of me, and that I won't be able to take on much of anything else during that period, I suspect I just won't start. I don't have any genius ideas that feel worth that much effort. Just a lot of concepts I think are pretty cool.

The main thing is that doing structural edits at this very late stage of the story is likely too much, too late. I suspected it would be, but now I sure as hell feel it! I guess if I had the kind of brain that can work on this for several hours in a day, it would matter less, because I'd still have time to explore all of the fun things, but I can't right now.

I've been trying to teach myself to be a bit more chill about how I edit during the *checks* 191h57 (sob) and 50 millions (actually 4 or 5) rounds of editing, but clearly I don't know how to be chill about editing. Did I mention it took me 30 hours to write the first draft, and that I always say I prefer writing to editing? Something is skewed here.

I don't think a "better editing process" is what I need right now. I think more work in the early phases is where I should look next. ( Read more... )

I started alternating these edits with more lighthearted activities, like a fic I'm writing for a new fandom :) Obviously, that means editing will take even longer but it's keeping the insanity at bay, which is great! I recommend that! XD Unfortunately, I also feel like my writing is flat and lifeless at the moment. I know this kind of feelings ebb and flow over the seasons, and I just have to (gently) push through.

Progress is being made!! :) It's just a little bit harder to feel good about it at times. Step by step.

Current Mood: contemplative

flo_nelja

Catégorie : Les songes maudits de Carmilla (Vampire - Manoir - Nuit - Surnaturel - Gothique - Horreur - Nouvelle)

Un manga des années 80. Vladimir, le personnage point de vue, revient à Chicago après un voyage à travers le monde. Là il retrouve son ami Hugh, qui a toujours été étrange, et est encore plus obsédé qu'avant par son rêve récurrent, où il rencontre une petite fille dans un manoir.

Une partie du livre est un groupe d'américains universitaires et riches qui parlent de plein de choses, de l'évolution, de pouvoirs psy, du Japon, de ce qu'est un paus d'origine, de l'environnement, parfois c'est en rapport avec le scénario, parfois juste de la caractérisation ou les préoccupations de l'auteur, et ils sont tellement brillants ! et tellement snob ! j'adore ces conversations, elles sonnent très vrai.

Une autre est Hugh qui cherche désespérément l'origine de ce manoir, et des preuves de son existence dans le vrai monde, et Vladimir, qui a probablement un crush sur lui même si ce n'est pas central, qui l'accompagne à défuat de pouvoir l'arrêter et se retrouve happé dans cette histoire aussi.

C'était très intéressant, mais c'est le genre d'histoire où la fin n'est pas là pour expliquer, elle est là pour qu'on décide soi-même de quelle façon on veut recoller tous les morceaux, incluant les conversations dont j'ai parlé, cela demande une certaine quantité d'analyse, que je ne suis pas sûre de vouloir fournir, plus créée pour les gens aussi obsédés par ce manga que Hugh par sa maison de rêve.

Mais voilà, "intéressant" est la conclusion que je donnerais, cela ne ressemble à rien d'autre.

malurette

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mistressofmuses

I am so far behind... T_T

Waaaaay back at the beginning of the month, we went back to Castlewood Canyon, wanting to see the rest of the "Cave" trail, which had been closed earlier in the season for nesting turkey vultures. The turkey vulture nesting was definitely a success, judging by how many of them we saw!

As always... Bella!

And we got to see a couple deer! I know that we have just... so many deer, but I'm still always happy to see them. This one was obviously young, still with little fawn spots, though it was most of the way grown.

Sixteen more pictures:

Wandering up the short stretch of road between the parking lot and the trailhead, there were some milkweed that were absolutely COVERED in aphids. But they also had lots of happy ladybugs having a massive buffet, haha.

Looking up from lower on the trail.

The rock wall that was roughly where the trail was closed off last time. I like being able to see the space behind the front "section" of the rock.

We were able to continue on, now that the nesting closures have been lifted.

It wasn't... quite as impressive as hoped. Still didn't find the alleged caves, haha. The cliffs are really pretty, though.

Unfortunately the sun was at just the worst angle for all of these pictures looking up at the cliff, haha. But I liked the dramatic dead tree and the tall bit of the rock.

Again with the sun making it look like a dream sequence.

Turkey vulture!

Something was drilling into this fallen log, ha.

As we were heading back, Alex looked over to the side, and...

The little deer! Mostly grown, just a little small, but still with white fawn spots! So cute. (Yes, this is almost the same picture as above the cut.)

And a second deer, nearby the first.

Bella was very excited to see the deer. (I think I've mentioned before, but she does enjoy "watching" TV sometimes, especially animal programs. There was a wildlife rehab show we used to watch sometimes, and her favorites to watch were seals and deer, haha.) She doesn't seem to want to chase them or anything, just wants to go see them, ha.

That second deer, staring back at Bella. It didn't seem overly concerned.

Speaking of successful turkey vulture nesting... Not sure how easy it is to see, but aaaaall those little black specks in the sky are vultures. SO MANY.

A fairly nice chunk of a shed snake skin. Probably a bull snake... but not nearly as impressive as the one my mom found last weekend!

Another ladybug on milkweed.

A very impressively active wasp nest over the bathrooms, ha.

Bumblebee on a sunflower!

Still more trails to explore, but glad we got to do the rest of the sort of "horseshoe" of this trail, and glad we had a chance to get out for the day.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

petra

I can't celebrate Talk Like A Pirate Day without remembering the time Talk Like Stephen Maturin Day was proposed as an alternative on Making Light, which was probably the best thing to ever happen to that website.

Current Mood: sorry wrong icon
Current Music: It's the bloody Surprise!

yvannairie

My other birthday present -- an Elgato capture card -- arrived today and I'm honestly delighted by how much of it is packed in cardboard. The only plastic thing in the package was the capture card itself, having a plastic casing, and a die-cut sticker I slapped on my PS2 b/c why not. The clamshell the card and cables were in was cardboard, and even the ribbons holding the cable rolls closed were cardboard instead of plastic.

autobotscoutriella

Laptop broken :( Which is not unexpected - I'm hard on laptops - but I'd like to keep this one running for a while longer, if I can. The repair shop said they'd have a diagnosis for me this afternoon or first thing tomorrow, and I'm really hoping for this afternoon.

(Not having a computer for a few days really isn't the end of the world. I have plenty of books, a functioning TV, video games...I can entertain myself. But I have Issues around letting other people handle my computer, so it's making me twitchy. Also, dropping it off for repair required me to explain that I fucked around with the regedit two years ago and broke something I didn't bother fixing because I didn't know what I was doing, which is just embarrassing.)

Current Mood: thoughtful

malurette

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flo_nelja

Catégorie : Chaudron, Foudre, et Clair de Lune (Fantastique - Magie - Sorcière - Potion - Infusion - Herboristerie - Amour - Famille)

Un jour, la Brume est apparue et s'est mise à dévorer le monde entier. Des sorcières ont créé une petite communauté qui arrive tant bien que mal à la tenir à distance. Un jour, elles adoptent une orpheline qui vient de la Brume, la nomment Tempérance, et l'élèvent parmi elles même si elle ne sembler pas huamine. Mais la Brume vient la chercher, et Tempérance va devoir faire ses proches choix.

Il y a plein de choses que j'aime bien dans cette BD, et elles voisinent avec plein de choses sur lesquelles je suis plus réservée. Le dessin est très beau, très agréable, mais parfois, j'ai du mal à reconnaître les personnages les uns des autres, il suffit d'une coupe de cheveux. Le worlbuilding a beaucoup de potentiel, en particulier la Brume et le fonctionnement de la magie, mais il se base assez lourdement sur les équivalences femme=magie=nature=Bien et homme=science=technologie=Mal, ce qui me fait lever les yeux au ciel ; mais cela pourrait être subverti dans la suite ? La romance a du potentiel, mais elle est trop rapide pour moi. J'hésite, je lirai le tome 2 si la bibliothèque l'achète, mais je ne l'achèterai pas moi-même.

hannah

The highlight of the day was sending out a pair of novel queries, the first in a while. Beyond that, not much. I got the flu and TDAP boosters yesterday, so my arm's sore enough I didn't want to move it a whole lot, certainly not for weightlifting, so all it was in the gym was the treadmill.

I also found out why I hadn't been informed of certain family developments: they're all on the family group chat. However, everyone else is using the iPhone's proprietary message system. Last week I turned that off to just get text messages, thinking that might help with coordinating movie theater seats - if an iPhone message wouldn't get sent, maybe a text would. Then the other people arrived and I didn't think about it for several days, until my dad gave me a call the other day about recent ongoing developments. I tried turning that feature back on, but it didn't bring in the backlog of things that'd been shared, so I'm still at a loss for how things are going. I'm also really tempted to turn it back off, just to see what happens. Except given how my phone's already largely incapable of getting internet-based message services, there's not much of a difference to be made.

Current Mood: discontent
Current Music: Mr Jones - Counting Crows

malurette

Par petits bouts, j'ai fini de regarder la première saison de Miraculous Ladybug. Qu'est-ce que je peux dire, c'est assez fun, mais je ne crois pas que je m'en ferais un fandom. Ne serait-ce que parce que j'arrive tellement en retard dessus. C'est un peu beaucoup répétitif jusqu'ici, j'espère que ça va commencer à changer dans la saison 2 ?
Pour l'instant je m'amuse à relever les différences subtiles qui indiquent que ça se passe dans un un univers paralèlle (outre la différence majeure que, y'a des superhéros et des superméchants magiques). Genre, Paris a l'air plus petit et beaucoup moins peuple (14 élèves dans une classe de 3ème au lieu de 34 ??) et sans aucun touriste (le Trocadéro quasi désert ??)
Septembre qui compte 31 jours, Hidalgo qui a pris cher, la ligne 33 St Lazare-Austerlitz qui n'existe ni sur mon plan papier ni sur le site de la RATP mais les bus ça peut changer, les lignes de métro 17 et 20 très en avance sur le programme, le Stade des Princesses...

Too French, Didn't Read: Malu started watching Miraculous Ladybug and is bugged that their alternate universe Paris is a tad off ~~shut up it's fiction and tongue-in-cheek clichés!~~

prixmium

I got home about an hour earlier today and slightly less disgusting. It got back up in the 90s F today with humidity to spare, but about time work as winding down, some wind blew in what was supposed to be rain but which was a temperature drop of about 10F in an hour, though that still left it in a more comfortable but still quite warm 80s range.

Managed to clean my dishes that had been sitting for two days. Was going to try to cook something but realized the eggplant from the mail had started to go bad, so screw it, I'll wait for the weekend. I have to work this Saturday but only a half day and I get to sleep in.

I'm still just feeling so brain-cooked and frustrated. I want to be creative, but I always just feel like I'm in trouble for not doing enough to entertain the friends I have who care what I do.

I got a little notebook in the mail. Plan to use it for prayer journaling due to the whole brain-is-too-slippery-and-overheated feeling.

I also wrote in my little Japanese study notebook I started before I moved here in 2024 for the first time since. Something about my old boss's approach to "encouraging" me to learn Japanese just made me pissed off for over a year. At least I am doing something, but I want to do things that don't just feel practical without being too tired to function.

Current Mood: blah

vriddy

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

Over the last week...

Commented on booknook.

Signal boosts:

fan_writers continues to see a lot of active discussions around meta about writing, if that is of interest to you! :)

flo_nelja

Catégorie : Latte : Une variations sophistiquée et crémeuse (Une couverture aux couleurs d'un latte à la cannelle et à la cardamome, marron, beige)

Une biographie d'Alan Turing. Dans l'histoire, Joan Clarke (qui était proche d'Alan Turing et lui a été brièvement fiancée) raconte à sa petite-fille ce qu'elle a connu d'Alan. C'est donc destiné à la jeunesse, exprès, que ce soit le contexte historique ou les explications scientifiques, destiné à quelqu'un qui n'a pas de grandes connaissances sur l'époque.

Au début, cela me semblait trop naïf, mais finalement, il faut prendre en compte le public visé, ce n'est pas si mal, sans devenir quelque chose que je recommande particulièrement à tous les gens qui ont passé le collège. Je me demandais, vu le titre complet, si le manga aurait quelque chose à dire sur l'AI moderne, qui pase le test de Turing mais n'est pas du tout ce que Turing aurait imaginé, mais non, cela n'en parle pas du tout. Peut-être est-ce le mieux, plutôt que d'en parler n'importe comment.

mistressofmuses

I took last Saturday and Sunday off to attend a model horse show with Alex. There haven't been many shows this year; he attended BreyerMidwest in the spring, but I wasn't able to take that weekend off, and the host who usually holds the majority of the semi-local shows has been taking a year off from it to do other things.

This one was held by a regular shower in the local community, and it was nice to have a show to attend!

It definitely made for a long day: we got up around 5:00 to get the car loaded, and then take Bella over to my mom's house for the day. We managed to get on the road by 6:30 or so (just slightly later than hoped, but did include getting coffee). After a couple hours' drive through mostly rural areas, we made it, just a bit after the 8:00 setup start.

The show itself was fun, but long, and a liiiiittle frustratingly disorganized. (The host kept changing things in the weeks leading up to the show, and continued changing things day-of.) Still, running a show includes SO many moving parts, and so much to keep track of, it's just a whole lot to do, so I appreciate anyone willing to do it!

Alex did pretty well - 21 NAN cards (the cards awarded to the top two places in each class of a NAN-qualifying show; serves as a "ticket" for that model to be entered into a relatively prestigious annual show) and 28 "Western Conference" cards (which appear to be an attempted regional "competitor" to NAN, which I have never heard of, despite it apparently having been a thing for 10 years... these "tickets" are awarded up to third place.)

Alex's biggest win was:

This is a custom that he did a few years ago. :) It was first in the custom Morgan class, and then went on to win the sectional champion for custom light breeds! (Got a ribbon and the 3-D printed dog. The show holder is very into German Shepherds, ha.)

This custom does extremely well for him, and deservedly so! The finishwork (done in pastels rather than paint) is extremely well done. (It's that much more exciting that it does so well, since he was the artist.) He never seems to believe that it does deserve it, though!

By the end, we were just extremely tired. The biggest divisions took a long time to get through, and we didn't end up finishing the last of it until 9:00... and then had to deal with the drive back.

I felt really bad making my mom stay up that late to wait for us to come get Bella. We made decent time on the way back (via a different route), and managed to get there just after 10:30 to pick her up, so not really much later than mom and Taylor would have been staying up anyway.

Mom said that Bella was very good. (She still hasn't really met Jaspurr; he came downstairs once, and as soon as Bella hopped off the loveseat to approach him, he bolted back upstairs and didn't come back down.)

Their excitement for the day was mom taking Bella on a neighborhood walk and finding...

A huge snake shed! Broom for scale, lol.

There is a huge bull snake somewhere in the neighborhood! :D

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Location: my apartment

pauraque

In this sequel to The Three-Body Problem, it's now out in the open that an alien invasion is coming. But the aliens' doomed planet is far away and this is hard SF, so they're not expected to reach Earth for 400 years. The book follows a mostly new set of characters and international organizations as they try to work out a long-term plan to somehow defend Earth against a force with vastly superior technology and no interest in negotiating.

This book is 500 pages long and I don't think it had to be. I found the first half a real slog, as it mostly focused on plot elements that I felt were not plausible (not for speculative reasons, but for No Real Person Would Ever Do This reasons) and, surprisingly, a romance. I don't know if Liu got the criticism that the first book didn't care about people so he decided to put in a love story, or what, but the way he handles it is extremely strange and unrealistic and made me question whether he had ever interacted with a woman in his entire life, so maybe he should have stuck with ideas over people.

It also suffers from a rather flat and awkward English translation that calls way more attention to the fact that it is a translation than the first book's did. (They had a different translator for this one, but brought back Ken Liu for book three.) That's not the book's fault, but it definitely affected my experience of it.

That said, the second half did pick up a lot, and leaned much more heavily into Liu's strengths as a writer: the inventive worldbuilding and the show-stopping cinematic set pieces. I did enjoy that and it brought me back to what I liked about the first book. Liu has a distinctive knack for making even catastrophic and grisly events weirdly fun to read about because of how hard he commits to them and how intricately he constructs their details. Anybody can write about stuff blowing up in space, but not everybody can show exactly why and how it's blowing up, zoom into individual pieces of debris and out to massive chain reactions, and have a reader like me, who is often bored by action scenes, attentively following along every step of the way.

many spoilery thoughts

The main thing I thought was implausible was the concept of the Wallfacers. Basically, the UN chooses four people and gives them each unlimited resources to develop and enact a plan to defend against the aliens. There's no oversight and anything they do is legal and unquestioned. This is supposed to counter the aliens' ability to remotely surveil Earth; if the plan takes shape in one person's head, then the aliens, who are said to not understand secrets and deception, won't find out about it.

Many things about this concept invite skepticism, but my biggest issue is how the presentation glosses over the complexity of human societies. Liu assumes that essentially everyone in the world will tacitly support whatever the UN does, with no significant debate or objection, even when it directly affects people's lives. He has the Wallfacers using so many resources for their massive defense constructions that it's crushing the global economy, and people just twiddle their thumbs and let it happen. He often paints global reactions with an extremely broad brush, like "people felt/thought X" as though all of humanity were a monolith. I can't speak for countries other than my own, but in this situation I can confidently say that half the people in the US probably wouldn't even believe the aliens were real, and even if they did, they sure as hell wouldn't put their faith in four people arbitrarily selected by the UN to save us all.

Sometimes Liu seems to know there are problems with these ideas, as when the narrative flashes forward a couple of centuries and the Wallfacer project is seen as one of the many "silly" things attempted during the initial panic over the invasion. Then again, Wallfacer Luo Ji's plan does basically work in the end, so I wasn't really clear on what the book was trying to say here.

I did enjoy the future worldbuilding, where most humans live in underground cities of massive treelike skyscrapers that hold up the ceiling where a holographic sky is projected. He did a slightly better job here of showing that cultures aren't all the same; a lot of people in the future are "hibernators" who were put into stasis in the past at various times and reawoken later, and their attitudes often differ from people who are native to the future. This also helped build a believable friendship between Shi Qiang and Luo Ji, since they're the only two people they know from their time. (I think this is the only compelling human relationship in the book, certainly better than whatever the hell was supposed to be happening with Luo Ji and the imaginary woman he made up in his head who turned out to be real somehow... It's a long story.)

I was also interested in the concept of the accidental generation ships. Almost the entire Earth fleet is destroyed by an alien probe that they thought was harmless, and the few crews that barely escape believe (understandably) that returning to Earth is suicide and that continuing to flee is humanity's best hope for survival. This entire scenario plays out over the length of a chapter, but whole books could be written about it! The part where they realize that they have too many people to keep alive long-term and some will have to be sacrificed read like an homage to "The Cold Equations," though I don't know if that story is as well-known among Chinese SF readers.

Of course it's also consistent with the book's generally pessimistic outlook on space exploration. I did know before I started reading what the "dark forest" solution to the Fermi Paradox is, but I didn't know the hypothesis was named after the book!! The idea is that the reason we haven't found aliens is that the galaxy is fucking dangerous and any planetary civilizations that foolishly jump around waving their hands and flashing neon signs trying to make first contact only make themselves a target. Aliens are out there, but the ones who have survived are the quiet ones. As a person whose favorite SF canon is Star Trek, this obviously doesn't align with my preferred way of looking at things, but it's internally consistent and not implausible, so I can roll with it.

I am invested enough to read the third book, and looking forward to getting back to a translator who knows what he's doing at least.

yvannairie

I've just managed to install Linux Mint 22.1 on my computer and I've discovered that first install Linux takes just as much updating and polishing the inside of the screen to get it up and running as Windows.

I did immediately find a way to get all of my Firefox settings over, and I'm currently working out how to best install Discord so that I don't run into hardware issues -- plus the obligatory "cleaning up the interface and setting myself some nice background images and system sounds.

malurette

Title: Monster house
By: Gil Kenan
Language: English (+closed captions)
Type: 3D animation
Genre: horror
Length: 1h38
Release date: 2005

Where: on Netflix

(CGI made by motion capture to emulate stop-motion; a bit weird looking)

In 80ties, a suburb in the US. Losers DJ and "Chowder" Charlie, plus teenage entrepreneuse Jenny, investigate the mystery of the house opposite DJ's. It's not just inhabited by a cranky old man, it actually eats stuff, possibly people!

Ok that was harsher that i expected. Wow.

drawnecromancy

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Page Summary

autobotscoutriella - (no subject)
vriddy - Edits, edits, always pondering edits
flo_nelja - Pumpkin Autumn Challenge : Liddell au clair de lune (Uchida Yoshimi)
malurette - La solitude du cirque ~Jean-Paul Tapie
mistressofmuses - Tuesday, September 02: Castlewood Canyon (yes, again)
petra - Give you joy of the day
yvannairie - LEP 19.9.
autobotscoutriella - (no subject)
malurette - [BD] Huertos muertos
flo_nelja - Pumpkin Autumn Challenge : La Marche Brume (Stéphane Fert)
hannah - Strolling through.
malurette - (no subject)
prixmium - Still too tired
vriddy - Community Thursday
flo_nelja - Pumpkin Autumn Challenge : Alan Turing (Osada Kaoru, Matsuo Yutaka)
mistressofmuses - Saturday, September 13: High Country Live Model Horse Show
pauraque - The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin (2008)
yvannairie - Linuxposting 17.9.
malurette - [film] Monster house
drawnecromancy - linux mint

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memorizingthedigitsofpi

Reading

(no subject)

Edits, edits, always pondering edits

Pumpkin Autumn Challenge : Liddell au clair de lune (Uchida Yoshimi)

La solitude du cirque ~Jean-Paul Tapie

Tuesday, September 02: Castlewood Canyon (yes, again)

Give you joy of the day

LEP 19.9.

(no subject)

[BD] Huertos muertos

Pumpkin Autumn Challenge : La Marche Brume (Stéphane Fert)

Strolling through.

(no subject)

Still too tired

Community Thursday

Pumpkin Autumn Challenge : Alan Turing (Osada Kaoru, Matsuo Yutaka)

Saturday, September 13: High Country Live Model Horse Show

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin (2008)

Linuxposting 17.9.

[film] Monster house

linux mint

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June 2024

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