Flight Recordings

For the next several minutes, this is my favorite song ever.

HOLY SHIT I AM TWO WEEKS AND CHANGE AWAY FROM AN ENTIRE YEAR WITHOUT ANY ACTUAL WRITING ON THIS BLOG.

Seriously?

I did not attend AC.

For those of you who follow my journal but not Shaenon's, and who are interested in my work in general, and in "Skin Horse" in particular, but who haven't actually been following "Skin Horse" inasmuch as you would have had to have missed Sunday's update...

...this post is for you. You know who you are. Assuming you exist.

For all the caveats above, the message is surprisingly simple. Skin Horse, Vol. 1 is planned to go to press soon. Taking pre-orders now. THAT IS ALL.

I have decided that ALL DAY I am going to talk on the INTERNET just like DUG the TALKING DOG from the movie UP.

This will be okay because Dug speaks VERY CLEARLY and SQUIRREL!

...This is the most fascinating category on all of Wikipedia. I could totally spend hours reading stories about people who don't exist.

Also, hey LJ. Looks like it's been two months since last post. Miss me?

Facetious posting recounting wholly-fabricated event just credible enough to convince hypothetical readers of its validity for a few moments.

You know, funny thing about Firesign Theatre... any given album sounds like more or less complete nonsense the first time through, but as you give them multiple playthroughs, they start making more and more sense. Is it because the performance really is that layered, or is it merely that the listener in question goes more and more insane the more he or she listens? Dunno.

For some unknown reason, a term has dropped out of my brain, or at least the bridges by which I might access it are mysteriously cut and burned.

What is the special term used to mean "noteworthy success at a particularly difficult task"? I am going crazy here. It's already cost me about an hour and a half of sleep.

So this is what it's going to be like as I get older. Damn.

EDIT: "Tour de force" is the term I was looking for. Thanks to all for assisting.

...but dude, check out the boss new userpic.

Some years ago, I proposed that if I had to take one taste with me into eternity -- assuming eternity exists -- it would be the taste of the first little slice of wooden stick at the edge of a licked-down Popsicle. I now have a smell to add to it: the little bit of warm, library-scented air trapped in the book depository, as experienced when opening it for the first time on a cold morning. With luck, I'll get all five, eventually.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single "Whump". It's the most epic "Skin Horse" yet! Read it here!

(1) So, let's say you discover a massive space installation built by a mysterious progenitor race, populated by inscrutable and noncommunicative but not immediately hostile insect-like beings with an apparent agenda to keep the station functional. You do not know the true aims of the progenitor race. You do not know the true aims of the insect-like station keepers. You cannot, and this is terribly important, even access all the places they go, and you have no idea what they're doing down there, as you apparently cannot even scan those decks with any degree of accuracy. Do you:

A. Give it a wide berth, at first. Create a permanent cordon, seal all flightspace around the station, and carefully and gradually let science teams access the site with full military escort. Or,

B. Build a ring station of your own surrounding it, and use this ring station as a center for careful scientific investigation of what is unquestionably the greatest and most pristine artifact of the ancient Protheans you have ever discovered, or,

C. BUILD A GREAT BIG DAMN CITY RIGHT ON TOP OF IT AND USE IT AS THE SEAT OF YOUR WHOLE ENTIRE GOVERNMENT.

If you answered "C", you are the Galactic Council, and I get to hit you with a fish.

( Other thoughts... )

This. This, right here.

Yeah, so, for a couple reasons, Dead Space is a no-go. Maybe five years down the road I'll see it at a resale store or something and give it a whack, but right now, I just can't shuffle another piece of activateware; too much of a headache. Also factoring in to my decision is the fact that my nerves are pretty much shot from the first half of F.E.A.R., which I'm coming to fairly late, but oh my crap creepy little girl.

Unfortunately, I'm having trouble getting the gumption up to finish F.E.A.R., not actually because of "oh my crap creepy little girl", but because of the relentless repetition of the enemy encounters whenever oh my crap creepy little girl isn't around. Excellent job on the A.I., folks, very well done, but there's only so long I can mow down the same three bad guys before frustration sets in. Half-Life did a much better job at mixing things up a little.

Also, has anybody heard jack squat about Cryostasis? I'm all for another historical period sci-fi shooter, and fighting one's way through a stranded nuclear-powered icebreaker at the roof of the world is certainly a compelling concept. Plus, it looks like they paid a great deal of attention to their Freezing To Death dynamic (forcing the player to huddle next to light bulbs and whatnot before charging out into the deadly cold), but actual data is pretty slim, and the Wikipedia article reads like a vanity post from the (presumably) foreign developers. What's up with that?

Lastly, OMFG BIOSHOCK 2 BIOSHOCK 2.

On the one hand, another piece of DRM-laden 3-activation rentware. I bought my current laptop with a small, fast hard drive with the apparently naive presumption that I would be able to swap games in and out at will as I needed them; I mean, why do I need do load my drive down with a full install of every software package I own? The answer came quickly, as I learned of and quickly burned through about four of my five Bioshock activations before I wholly understood what the hell was going on and before 2k finally issued a revocation tool, which doesn't make me perfectly happy but at least settles my hackles down a little.

EA shows its consumers no such largesse, and we just barely missed having a 10-day cycle on Mass Effect -- the buzzkill of that initial news was so strong that I still haven't bought a copy, though I keep meaning to. Dead Space is more of the same: 3 activations, no revocation tool planned. I, along with legions of gamers, hate the concept that we have to go begging the company to play the game we already paid them for. It's distressing and it makes me never want to buy anything from them again.

On the other hand, OMG DEAD SPACE OMG OMG OMFG.

So there's kind of a struggle here, see.

Chris Onstad's The Great Outdoor Fight, signed and numbered first edition #72/500, is now in my keeping, and few things could make me happier with it. He even thought to include the (frankly mandatory, IMO) post from Ray's blog on the endpaper. Also got this cute little nickel-sized pin, which almost makes me wish I had a pin collection to add it to. Due to a chance interaction between my right index finger and a rather bumpy crossing-light button, approached at an odd angle because of the parcel I was carrying, I actually had a bloodied knuckle of my own as a result -- albeit indirectly -- of the G.O.F. There is something quite perfect about this.

...when you begin assessing objects in your environment in terms of how much damage they would do when chucked at an enemy with a zero-point energy projector. Case in point with a discarded porcelain sink I walked past in the parking garage of City Hall this morning.

...which is most of you.

One of the unfortunate side-effects of the existing Skin Horse Feed is that while it is quite good about drawing the designated daily comic from WCN, there is no provision for additional images or commentary (as happens on Sundays). Typically this is a minor inconvenience for our feed-only readers, but I suppose it's coming to a head now because -- in what is perhaps the SINGLE negative side-effect of this year's Ryan Estrada Takes Over the Internet day -- our feed-only readers have missed Wednesday's comic altogether, posted as it was in the WCN commentary area (to make space for Ryan's excellent guest strip.) Additionally, to those users reading only the feed, it may not have been clear that there was in fact a Wednesday strip at all. While it would be a simple enough matter to click over to the main site, it is (understandably) an inconvenience, and I yet do not have enough contempt for my fanbase to wish this upon any of you. It would be nice if somehow the feed could draw not only the daily image from WCN's servers but also the artist commentary blocks (which contain the raw HTML that draws additional images from Shaenon's webspace.)

I am frightfully under-informed about all matters XML, so I realize that to those of you in the know this may well sound like someone asking "Is there any way for me to get my pet goldfish to chop vegetables like a food processor?" But hey, worth a shot.

--EDIT: Oh... and is there anyway to retroactively put something onto the feed, as a temporary stop-gap? And how do I get my pet goldfish to split hydrogen atoms? I must know!