Cheated again!

Yes, again. I paid for a good night’s sleep and all I got was a 2-hour nap. This is worse than usual; four hours is more typical. All you normals out there, please don’t bombard me with suggestions for how to overcome insomnia. NONE OF IT IS RELEVANT. Most of it is old wives’ tales, AFAIC, and the best of it comes off as horribly patronizing. I am not mentally impaired, not inexperienced, not ignorant. I am very aware of what is going on in my own mind and body, accustomed to finding my own solutions to problems, and my success record tops anythig medical professionals have tried to perpetrate on me.

My sleep irregularity has roots unfathomable. It is an irregular irregularity, a chaotic cycle that has no truly predictable pattern. I can often tiptoe around it and achieve some apparent success by timing and regulating my food intake — but there are no guarantees. A day filled with healthy outdoor activity, ending with a light snack at the proper time, and no big worries, may result in too-short sleep, while a good night of 6+ hours may follow a low-down day with a heavy afternoon nap. It’s my body and it’s fucked up. Always has been, always will be. You don’t have my genes or my background, so shut TF up. BS me no BS.

In my early years, my sleep was often disrupted or delayed by my immature parents’ screaming battles. That certainly had its effect on establishing a pattern, or lack of it. However, it’s been a long time since then. 3am is a peaceful time here and now. I am in control of my own life — as much as anyone can be.

Yesterday I could understand the short night. Although I worked hard and could, by “normal” standards, expect to sleep soundly, I anticipated an unusual schedule, and that left a back door open for unconscious sabotage. It was no surprise to suffer what I call the four-hour curse. Today, with no fixed appointments ahead of me, no restraints, a good feeling following a pleasant conversation, I expected something better than a two-hour nap after staying up until after midnight (going to bed earlier is a guarantee of short sleep for me). Yesterday was productive, too. I earned a good sleep. I didn’t get it.

So here I am, having a beer or two and blogging before dawn. There’s a good morning’s sleep ahead, with my head buried under a pillow. If you love your life, don’t call me.

For your irrelevant amusement, here’s my latest desktop screenshot, featuring a bit of my own front yard:

Speaking of Twitter….

I’ve been in it for over a month now. I like it. Finding new friends, renewing old aquaintance, following interesting links and learning about things I would have overlooked — tons of redeeming social value.

But then there is the Dark Side of Twitter. Individuals whose main objective is self-promotion for profit at the expense of others. MLM whores who will randomly follow anyone in the hope of building their downline. I have one thing to say to these bloodsuckers — Fuck off. Following me will only get you one good slap in the face and a lifetime of being blocked.

Because my tweets are varied, I expect to collect a lot of short-term followers who latch onto some keyword in a search. I check out all followers. If I like what I see, I follow back. If I don’t…see previous paragraph.

10,000 Big Codwallops

omfg maize
Corn and beans -- who needs Columbus?

As Tweeted:
Library, DVD, 10,000BC stupidest mammoth hunt ever, bamfsckingboo spearshafts, fscking MAIZE, GMAB OMFG ROFLUIH

I haven’t been much of a moviegoer/watcher for a long time. No TV, no money, no car. However, I do have a computer, so once in a while I do get hold of something. Lately it’s been happening more often. DSL helps, LOL. So does having a regular job and my property taxes paid up. Last year I bought the Lord of the Rings. This spring, I’m feeling a bit livelier, so I can walk to the library. That means even more movies.

Yesterday, I had returned Apocalypto and was browsing the shelves. Couldn’t find anything that jumped out and said “Watch me!” so I decided to take 10,000 BC home and see how bad it was.

It surprised me — it was better than I expected. It could have been better yet, had it been called Godslayer, or Legacy of Atlantis, or some such thing befitting the (sadly abbreviated) epic fantasy that it wants to be. Because it is certainly not a story about what might have occurred anywhere, anywhen, around 10,000 years BCE.

Consider the fact that it apparently covers at least three continents, on both hemispheres. Points lost there, big time.

That mammoth hunt. Cheese and tripes, it is amazingly bad. These are experienced, profesional mammoth hunters? They expect to eat tomorrow? The lead bull — ROFLUIH! Just that alone is so sad.

Proportions — yes, mammoths were big, but really. And the pussycat. Not to mention it looked kind of silly bouncing away in its last scene. I rather liked the Androcles-and-the-lion bit, though.

D’leh — how can you say it without thinking “delay”? He wasn’t such a bad character, just needed a little common sense behind him. I’d like to have seen the whole storyline fleshed out a bit instead of glossed over with see next paragraph

The sporadic narration. I’m on the edge of writing a flaming rant about movies that tell instead of showing. Talk about pitiful. There is no place in the body of a film for that sort of thing unless it is autobiographical. While 10K is not as bad in this respect as the Clan of the Cave Bear superfail, it’s bad enough. For God(dess) sake, look at Quest for Fire. Please. It’s an amazing masterpiece, or at least tour-de-force, of paleo-fantasy. QfF is a rare phenomenon. With no understandable dialog, it hasn’t even the slimmest chance for an as-you-know-bob, and there is not one word of intrusive narration.

And speaking of dialog — fscking Tribalspeak! With an accent, yet, and oodles of rolled R’s. Don’t get me started.

Army marching through desert with no visible means of support. Numbnuts who can’t follow the stars until another numbnuts points out something stupidly impossible. Mammoths working their big hairy butts off in a desert with no mile-high haystacks in sight. People, listen to me, if an army marches on its stomach, a mammoth sees their rations and raises them a hundredfold. Pachyderms are eating machines.

And then, after all that, one of the African types hands over a baggie of corn. Zea maiz, primo cultivar of the New World. Where T. F. are we? Kansas?

I could take 10K, I could love it, as a Conanoid fantasy. But I’d like to clean it up a lot even for that.

Going to have to watch Apocalypto again to take the taste of stale joke out of my mouth. Except for certain little details of the moon, that one is everything I could want in prehistorical film.

E.T.A.: I forgot to mention the galloping mammoths in the climactic scenes. ZOMG. Galloping . Mammoths . *groan*

The invisible crutch phrase (rants and confessions)

What is one of the most useless sets of pad-words, a mainstay of badfic, a hallmark of inattentive or amateurish writing? Hint: It isn’t on any of the big lists of useless crap.

Watched as

Watched WHAT as? “As” implies simultaneous action. “As” is overused and abused enough without this pernicious parasitic phrase.

This well-established writerism goes unnoticed, even when it is used twice in the same page. How many occurrences can you count in your work? Can you live with it once you’re aware of it?

I am painfully aware. It bugs the hell out of me; the w.a. flea jumps out and bites me wherever I find it. When I see it in a beginning sentence, I read no more, because I know the rest is going to be poorly written. I confess to having let it slip out once, several years ago, in a fan-fic. This is all the more embarrassing because I am generally uncanonical and iconoclastic in my ficking. I hope to atone for that sin by raising awareness in others.

Ask yourself what it stands in for. What did you mean when you dropped in that habitual “watched as”? Does it mean merely that the character is watching something happen? Then say, “MC watched the parade pass by,” or “MC watched Villain skin Friend alive.” Does it mean more than that? Then say, “Held by the spell, MC watched, frustrated and helpless, while Villain skinned Friend alive.” Lousy example, but you can see how little meaning w.a. has.

A warning about “As” in general: While actions may be simultaneous, they can also have causative relationships, and/or might not have the same duration. I’ve seen a lot of as-linked phrases that implied a role reversal. “The specters crossed the room as the candle flickered once” does not give the same picture as “The candle flickered once as the specters crossed the room“. The first example is totally cockeyed; it says that the spectral parade lasted only as long as the brief flicker of the candle. I’ve seen this done over and over by writers with a bad as-habit.

AVATAR — Supersize my lie!

Let’s postulate a peaceful tribe of Noble Savage warriors descended from carnivores. Send them an Honorable White Man with a selfish motive. Let’s have this HWM, this super Everyman’s Gary Stu, be sucked right into their neo-aztec NuAge culture and impress the tits off them. Yeehah.

Uh…too oxymoronic for you? Okay, let’s pile on a shitload of gaudy color, make everything three times as large as life (except for what has to be ten times larger than life), and keep the action fast and violent. There. Now the unbelievability factor has increased to the point of stupefaction. You have to accept it because…because the gimmick of 3D is so cool.

But…but…waitaminnit, what about the truly awesome Message? Mustn’t we be mindblown by the Oneness of all these bloodthirsty creatures with their too-grand environment? Shouldn’t we have the tits impressed off us by things like the straight out of Disney’s Fantasia tree seed scene? I mean, hey, all this NuAge wonderfulness is in direct opposition to the horrors perpetrated by lying politicians and greedy corporate entities, right?

Right. Let’s fight lies with bigger lies until we smash ’em all flat!

The Message doesn’t apply to the real world. Take off the goggles, walk out of the theater, and what do you have? A lot of wishful thinking. Baby, your buttons have been pushed.

You want a pristine environment? You’re probably going straight to Wal-Mart afterward to blow what’s left of your entertainment money on plastic crap. Then you’re going to your overheated home to eat junk. It’s too much effort to change your habits. Too hard to think about the connection between what you do and the consequences of your actions. Yes, Ducky, your actions. Not Those Other Bad People, you.

You want peace? Let’s kill the enemy, blow up their stuff. There’s a Message for you.

Avatar is going to help make this world a better place to live, you betcha. For liars. So lie to yourself, hang onto those fantasies of pure unobtanium, but don’t let them intrude into your Real Life; don’t look at them too closely. Just believe in lies, and keep the big liars rolling in money.

A few words about…that stuff

Spammers are almost the sorriest thing on Earth.

I say almost, because the filthy pigs that create the malware and other fool-traps and pay stupid spammers to push their garbage are worse.

You can’t even flush them down toilets. They should be vaporized in nuclear reactors, or they will continue to contaminate everything. Yuck.

I’m not bletching about my own spam-count; it has been pretty low, and Akismet makes a joke of it. What outrages me is the desecration of useful forums. The worst are the slime that send PMs to unsuspecting forum members. Their victims are often not very computer literate; they have joined a forum seeking help with their software problems. This is like going into a hospital or clinic and preying on the sick and injured.

Spamming pigs, you are loathsome.

Catch-21.95, the dilemma of cavespeak

What exactly makes a word or phrase “too modern” to be used by a resident of the Pleistocene? Can anyone give me a nice concise accurate dictionary of caveman-speak?

I don’t think so.

I am constantly amazed at how one person after another can pick out dozens of “wrong” words — and no two lists are anything alike. Each reader has a unique set of pet peeves. Most of it is from (IMHO) expectation based on assumptions ingrained by exposure to Hollywood crap. Movie cavemen must talk like cavemen. Pile it on, grind it in. They are dumb savages, right?

Wrong. They are our ancestors, and they were some damn smart cookies. They created works of art that put goosebumps all over modern viewers. They were human beings who concerned themselves with food, hunting, survival, what the neighbors were up to, and why the stars stuck to the sky. They had rich, complex language that we can only guess at from root words that survived in many modern tongues.

So, why is it wrong to interpret their (fictitious) thoughts in words that come as close as possible to what they intend to say?

Every word that I use to write is modern English. Where do I draw the line? And then there’s the other side of the coin. My vocabulary is large and eclectic. It isn’t limited to what some people hear on TV. Is it all right to use a word that Shakespeare liked?

Just gimme a clue.

Ayah-kayah.

A Drum is…

I’ve always kvetched about how clunky and horrible Java is. I suppose it still is, but now that I have DSL and am getting to be a spoiled brat, I have to admit that wordl is fun. Here’s all of ADIE in one tidy little word cloud:

A Drum Is...

I guess it’s kind of obvious who the MC is.