Category: Me

Wottever II

Still out of luck with excluding stuff. My best option for now is to turn off the tweet digest — I don’t really need it anyway.

Meanwhile, spam goes on. Most of it wouldn’t fool a month-old puppy, but who wouldn’t like to be flattered all to heck with:

Wow, incredible blog layout! How long have you been blogging for? you make blogging look easy. The overall look of your web site is fantastic, as well as the content!

or —

I like the valuable information you provide in your articles. I will bookmark your blog and check again here regularly. Iā€™m quite sure I will learn many new stuff right here! Best of luck for the next!

Except, of course, that both warm-fuzzing inanities were posted by the same shitbot, linking to the same product. A useful item, perhaps, but Not On My Blog!

I was delighted to receive a nice chunk of novel to beta read a couple of days ago. The long wait was worth it; I devoured it ravenously and tossed the bones back with lots of pointy comments. Now waiting on chair’s edge for the rest of it.

That inspired me to go back to my own novel-in-waiting and make a few small edits where I can now see that I did not make things clear enough. I’m very happy with those tiny but — IMHO — important changes.

wottever

The front page excluded category plugin still isn’t working.

I am still working, but entirely behind the scenes. Actually not so bad for me, but awkward for my employer.

I’m not very talkative today; it all drains out on Twitter, I guess.

The Tree of Story

Some writers are aghast at the notion of going back for revisions before a work is finished. Fine for them, but I don’t write in a straight line. I can’t. Writing, for me, is three-dimensional, fractal.

There is a lot more to a tree than foliage. Growth takes place everywhere. Roots dig deeper and deeper for nutrients. The trunk grows wider, heals the wounds of fallen branches. Light and weather influence its shape.

My novel has roots, a trunk, branches and leaves, sap that flows two ways. There are times when the sap retreats to the roots. Growth stops, dead leaves fall, and weak branches break off. Then the sap rises again. The story lives and flourishes because it has strong roots. Its growth is a series of cycles, not jerky spurts.

I am the sap, moving all through the tree. I am also a squirrel running up and down the trunk.

Oh the Tweet Pain

Nice, I have a plug-in that collects my tweets. But I don’t want my blog cluttered with stale tweets — that archive is only for my own reference — so I install a plug-in that keeps that category out of sight. Then a WP upgrade breaks something, and the twitflood pours out.

Owoo.

I try another plug-in. Doesn’t work. I tried another way, but that fizzled too. Final kluge: pack the crap out of here and delete. I have it, you don’t have to put up with it. But it’s going to be a weekly chore now. Feh. I’ll figure out/find something.

Wha’s Happenin’?

I know, I’m a lousy blogger.

Wottever.

The bad news:

Cops are on my back about yard maintenance. It got a bit shaggy after several years of ill-health caused mostly by lack of vitamins — caused by lack of money, caused by lack of job, etc. Also, there were various artifacts left by my grandfather, etc. etc.. So now that I’m halfway back on my feet, the city wants to knock me down again.

My extraordinary efforts to clean up have been seen as doing nothing. IMO I didn’t work on the front enough first. Fuck it, enough about that.

The good news:

SilentBob and I are enjoying a perpetually extended honeymoon. With drive space such as I would never have dreamed about back in 2001, I indulge my every whim, and my dear Bobster takes it all in stride. This poor computer now bears the burden of six installed operating systems and one virtual. My curiosity knows no bounds, and I am (almost) fearless.

We are into all sorts of graphics, sound, and video foolings-around.

On top of that mess, a laptop has joined the working crew. BitChunker, an “experienced” IBM Thinkpad, only has three OSes; Windows XP, Backtrack, and Slax. Bitsy’s job is info support for making house-calls, and wireless testing. The hard drive is a little weenie, no room for a lot of fun.

Oh, you thought this blog was supposed to be about writing and artsy stuff?

Well…I’m nine chapters into one novel, four into another, and A Drum Is Empty is suffering One. More. Edit.

Really-truly, the longer you leave work sitting, the more you see that can be trimmed and modified.

Another ongoing distraction is the Firebird Project. A friend who has been wanting to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet suite has roped me in. We are planning a presentation and discussion that will include a video of the ballet, a Powerpoint about the ballet and the legend, and a video using my music with fire photos and fractals. Part of the idea is to contrast the beginning of modern music with music and art of the computer age. Epic, daunting, but nearly two months to go yet.

fire demon

Miscellaneous:

I’m on a roll in Twitter. Clumps of followers. It’s not The Ahts, it’s the techness. And teh lolz. Only a third or so of recent new followers have been @-holes. I shitlist the @-holes, of course.

Hmm, I wonder what sort of spam this post will attract šŸ™‚

Fractal Sturgeons

The living sturgeons that gave their name to the bay that divides the Door county peninsula — and the city that straddles it — have been nearly wiped out by overfishing and pollution. But their ghosts now haunt the summer streets.

Ten years ago the first “Sturgeons Around the Bay” brought out interesting variations on the fishy form by local artists. This year they are back. I took a walk a couple of days ago and found two within a few blocks of my home. Both of them made me think of my large accumulation of fractal images. So I went digging into the seven years or so of Fractal Explorer archives for matching pics. Some of the collection is on CDs, but I found enough of what I was looking for on my current hard drive.

Gilda, by Emily Baker
Gilda, by Emily Baker

Soul-mate fractal
Soul-mate fractal
Menagerie of Mandalas, by Margaret Lucas
Menagerie of Mandalas, by Margaret Lucas

The mandala-like fractal forms that I dug up are a little disappointing in these small images. You really have to see the whole array of mind-boggling patterns of which they are a part. But then you would end up sitting at your computer, diving into fractals for hours, like I do.

The point is, I suppose, that art does not originate in our thpughts. It is, in some way, mathematically hard-coded in our cells. Everything is fractal.

A high, lonesome sound

Nearly seven years ago I was writing my last epic fan-fic novel, Borrowed Time. Hashmark Pin, the world’s smallest hacker (though very tall for a Borrower) travels from northern California to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, in search of love and a purpose in life. He finds it all.

I was also re-obsessed with music, having discovered the world of tracking. While Hash was stranded in Topeka, unable to move on for most of a year, I attempted to create a short tone poem that would evoke a sad longing, with images of trains passing by in the night. The piece, called Kansas Nights, turned out well, IMO.

Last night I put together a video using that bit of computer-generated music and a montage of railroad photos and fractals. It’s not too bad, though I would like to have found some better images. I could, but it would be easier to write another 187,000-word novel than get pernission to use dozens of photos that are not in the public domain.

So here it is:

Borrowed Time is no longer available on the web because of a character (who shouldn’t have been in it) whom I do not want exposed in his original incarnation. Fan-fic about Borrowers is a dubious commodity as well. Wottever.

Composed in MODPlug Tracker with original computer-gernerated sounds, Kansas Nights is perhaps not everyone’s cuppa. It depends on what you come expecting. Let the sound flow through your head with the images, let it be what it is. After all these years, I still like it.

My MP3 page

We’re not in canvas any more

Still obsessed with video. I’ve collected enough software to sink the hd of my first computer several times over. SilentBob bears it all uncomplainingly. Edit, convert, edit, save; my bitty movies are piling up. The duds get deleted — I DO sometimes get rid of useless things. Sometimes.

brickgeek3

The third edit of Brick Geek, an opportunistic documentary starring a bricklaying friend, is my best work so far. Though far from a masterpiece, it has some good moments. I worked hard to get the timing right. A lot of work for a mite short of four minutes of final product :).

I would upload it, but the star is out of town and I don’t want to be rude. Meanwhile, a nice, if sloppy, flower and music vid is up on Youtube: A Walk in the Garden. You can’t smell the roses. šŸ™

Update on an earlier post — I see by my site log that I’m not the only one who had a problem with MSE’s mpminisigstub.exe (and Comodo firewall). I still don’t know why the unpleasantness ended, which program gave in first. Doesn’t matter much. I fired MSE a couple of weeks ago because it did the unforgivable again. It rudely and peremptorily snatched harmless files away from me, with no hope of recovery unless I have them on a backup CD. Nothing does that to me and gets away with it.

I still recommend it for know-nothing users; it will protect them from even the stuffed tigers, so no harm is done. I just isn’t suitable for ornery old granny-hackers who refuse to run as admin.

The Return of Spring

It’s an established fact around here. Actually it’s fading rapidly into summer.. I gathered a few of my accumulated photos and a piece of music that I cobbled up several years ago — and recently edited — to make another practice video. It’s not too bad.

YouTube link

It’s been some time since I went into Obsession Mode with ModPlug Tracker and cranked out dozens of odd bits of music. I’m getting musical again, so watch out. My favorite piece, Kansas Nights, is high on my video to-do list.