Ravings

Dear Agent,

Or…ayah-kayah. The most re-written pitch in Wisconsin is on the prowl, or will be soon. I say “in Wisconsin” to limit my liability for bullshitting.

Southern Poland in the late Ice Age: The People are not your stereotypical cavemen. With a rich oral tradition, technology refined by long use, art woven into every fiber of daily life, they see themselves as the crown of creation. They take pride in what they do and who they are. And they have a great sense of humor. Well, most of them do.

Some of them also have magic.

Radovin’s bad luck has hit bottom. Only he, a despised apprentice shaman with few friends and no family, can expose two murderers. That he is bound to one of them by an oath sworn on his life, is yet another sign of his ill fortune. Avenging spirits will shred him merely for leaving his master, never mind betraying him.

His childhood dream of becoming a shaman may have withered in years of abuse and scorn, but Radovin’s not in a hurry to die. And, although the evildoers must be stopped, he doesn’t know the people he needs to tell or even where they now live. An ominous dream, coinciding with another murder, shatters his inertia. He flees toward the site of this year’s tribal gathering, where he hopes to make contact.

When he does, all heck breaks loose.

A 120,000 word fantasy, A Drum Is Empty should please lovers of the distant past as well as those who enjoy magical adventure.

I’m planning another drum, BTW. A floor drum, eight inches wide and maybe twenty tall. It will be a new adventure in frame building. Just bending the cardboard is a challenge. Narrow strips are easy; I pull them over my thumb to give an even curve. Because of the size, and because heating season is nearly over, this one will also take longer to build up. And be a pain in the butt while it is stting around in the way drying!

Yet Another Drum

On Sunday I reached the final stage of another 12-inch composite frame drum. This one’s for me, not for passing around at a drum circle.

Side
Side
Bottom
Bottom
Detail
Detail

I tried a different lacing method, and was very methodical about it. The head skin was not perfectly round, and the frame flexed to accommodate it. It looks even more lopsided than it is in the bottom shot because of the camera angle. Note the double edge binding that distributes the stress more evenly, preventing hole tearing. It isn’t extremely tight; a little moody in cold weather, but because of that it’s less likely to pop from heat.

The leather-wrapped cross handle is very comfortable. One leather strip was wound each way, the ends fastened by tucking under. I added another bit in the middle with one end cut into two narrow strips and pulled through with my trusty hemostat.

Here’s how it sounds:

Third recording test (MP3) — Simply whacking away with a padded striker

Hand-doodle (MP3) — My right hand does a little dance

Yes, I finally dragged my minimal gear over to the computer and futzed around until it worked. The new mike and the old boombox pre-amp go well together. 🙂

Boring…boring….

Another day, another Russian spam. And one of those things tried to join my forum. The spampig’s handle (ManninBlackk) got over 9000 Google hits. Time for a name change, dipshite; we know you.

Edited to add:
Spam posts can be hilarious if you are easily amused.

I enjoyed the article and thanks recompense posting such valuable news broadcast seeing that all of us to imply to, I bus station it both matchless and educational and I throw to conclude it as floor as I can.

Lordy, yes — I throw to conclude it as floor as I can too.

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.

Treading water

Not enough good sleep to make a meaningful post. I will some time soon, I hope. Both of the above.

This postcard turned up in a bad place when I reshuffled a shipload of junk so I could get up the stairs (the upstairs door was ajar, a criminal offense when the temperature outside hovers around 10F).

I believe the Standard sign (far left) belongs to my grandfather’s station (ETA: Yes, it is). Harry G. Ahlers, 1904-1984. I wish these old cards had dates on them.

postcard
Downtown Sturgeon Bay, ca. 1940

The signs have changed, but most of the buildings haven’t.

Dining out

I don’t, generally. But there’s a new restaurant in town, and I’m involved with it, and with activity related to it. Not in a big way, but enough to spice up my life.
The New Leaf Café is a quickly growing enterprise in downtown Sturgeon Bay. The theme is organic, raw, whole food. And if you think that’s ucky, you haven’t had lunch there. I have. Among other things, the stuffed tomatoes are to die for.

Word is gradually getting around. An article in the local paper, word of mouth (happy mouth, nom nom nom), and perhaps something in the air.

I’m the webmistress 🙂

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.

A wee Windwoes experiment

HILARITY! I wanted to test the statement that the GodMode folder — name.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} — would crash 64-bit Vista. Eh. Only Exploder goes down, and it is possible to stop the panic as long as a stable file manager is open to the folder’s location.

I created a folder named Sauron.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} on Raven’s desktop, in Free Commander, while logged on as Raven. (Raven is one of my Admin level personae.) It caused a repeating Explorer crash that kept the screen flickering until I was able to delete it — in Free Commander, the only file manager still standing LOL. It also crashed Exploder when placed in C root.

On mere user matera’s desktop, when I am logged in as that user, it is harmless. The deadly effect requires administrator privileges and/or a normal desktop. As matera, I use an alternative shell, so Explorer is not the turtle upon which the world sits.

*My source of inspiration*