poukledden

hi. i still live with my parents, and i feel like we pay a lot for our tv service. we have cable, and get maybe 50ish channels. also, we live in south-central indiana.

would anyone give any input on tv providers? satellite or cable. just who do you think is the cheapest, best channels, ect. thanks so much.

Finally! A coupon for Toronto!


Dufferin store location only.


Minimum $25 purchase before taxes. Excludes prescriptions, products containing codeine, lottery, postal services, stamps, transit tickets, prepaid phone cards, Rexall Pharma Plus gift cards, Gift card express cards, baby diapers, adult meal supplements, photofinishing, tobacco products and Taxes. Cannot be used in
conjunction with seniors day discount. Coupon must be surrendered at time of purchase and does not have a cash value. One Coupon per transaction per customer per day. Valid only at Rexall Dufferin & Belgravia, 2409 Dufferin St., Toronto. Offer Valid until Friday July 24, 2009. Cashier to scan barcode and retain coupon.



Direct coupon link.

Hi again, I had posted about cheap flights to see my ailing father. (I wound up hopping in the car instead) and after two weeks, he passed. Now I will be flying out to Texas*, renting a moving truck, and driving it back to California. This is going to be so costly gas wise, I'm not sure I'll get to California. My expenses while I'm out there could accrue as well, since I have to purchase items from an estate sale - the cost of an attorney to stop the estate sale would cost more than buying it.

My question is where to get the best rate for moving approximately a 2 bedroom house. Ballpark estimates of your previous experience is welcomed. We're driving from El Paso to Santa Barbara - only stopping to fill up. Am I overlooking a better option?

Thanks! This community has helped me so much throughout the years!

*Tip: skyscanner.net and momondo.com got me two tickets for the price of one.

It's 2019 and L. Ron Hubbard has the tech. He owns the friggin' MOON, or much of it anyway, but he needs more workers to build a great pyramid of waste plutonium (The Mu Pu Pile!) and so hatches a master plan. Only the recently unbrainwashed Agent C and occultist and rocket scientist Jack Parsons, sixty years after faking his own death, can stop him...thanks to the power of sex magick love.

Utilizing found footage from Flash Gordon serials, documentaries and educational films, and even North by Northwest, collage filmmaker Craig Baldwin presents in thirteen parts Hubbard's attempt to use Marjorie Cameron (Parsons's real-life former wife) to blackmail "Lockheed Martin" (here an individual) into building a spaceport right off the Vegas strip—plenty of people who need "clearing" and will fall for trillion year contracts there—by getting some pics of him wearing a bra. Martin needs Parsons' formula for perfectly reflective mirrors to create space lasers that will expand and cement American hegemony over the world. Parsons is nearly killed, but escapes, and after Cameron has an encounter with Aleister Crowley—he lives with the mole people and mutants in an underground lair—she saves the wounded Parsons and together they and all the mutants, beatniks and hippies rise up to destroy the weapons of mass destruction. Let love rule, baby.

If you're familiar with Parsons (the subject of two biographies that I know of) Mock Up on Mu can actually drag a bit. In addition to collage, Baldwin has filmed actors and built sets and whatnot. Using video and non-synced 16mm film we get a lot of dialogue (voiced by actors other than those on screen) and backstories and even a biography-cum-catechism of Cameron's life as explored by Crowley. The acting isn't great and some of the dialogue—at one point Cameron punctuates Hubbard's megalomanic plan-making by announcing the titles of seemingly apropos films and shows ("Dr Who?" "I Am a Camera" etc)—is a bit silly. The new footage works best when Baldwin uses various rear projection techniques to hint at movement, large crowds, and the surveillance state by mixing stock footage and new material and showing off the seams. The layering of effect is haunting and occasionally hilarious.

As a ritual experience, Mock Up is the teensiest bit too long as well. Sort of like church with a stammering priest. The collages, which allow for and celebrates rapidly shifting identities and also a secret history of rocketry, the military-industrial complex, and Hollywood, absolutely soar. They soar relatively speaking too, given the casting. Michelle Silva (Cameron) Kal Spelletich (who does look like Parsons) and Damon Packard (Hubbard) are all avant-garde filmmakers in their own rights, but only Spelletich has much screen presence as a performer. (Crowley is played by stock footage.) Radical comedian and occasional actor Stoney Burke plays Lockheed Martin very well, but he's not on screen so much.

Geniuses have minor works too. All film, except perhaps for Transformers, is ultimately an exercise in logistics, a battle against finite time and dwindling resources. Sometimes less is more and attempts at more is too much. Avant-garde epic-slash-epoch making is hard, man. Having said that, Mock Up on Mu is dizzying and often laugh-out-loud funny. It's certainly the best two hours of science fiction I've seen in a movie theater in several years. (For fantasy, I'd still say The Fall, which not surprisingly I also saw at the worker-owned Red Vic, is the recent best.) It's the best film I've seen this year. Actually, given the collage, it's the best 200 films I've seen this year.

I seem to be on a photo taking binge, so I thought I'd share :)

My boyfriend and I visited Louden Park in MD twice recently (he posted his pictures earlier).   Louden Park is kind of an odd cemetery in some ways.  The older section seems to be very well kept--the grass is cut, things are mostly neat--but there is a lot of wear too.  Statues missing body parts, graves covered in vines, random holes all over the place...I'm not quite as enthralled with it as I am with Greenmount and Mt. Carmel, but it's an interesting place to spend the day, provided you don't fall into a hole :-P




I don't know how I avoided them last time, but Friday I found myself falling into various holes throughout the cemetery.  The ones directly over the graves actually really freaked me out.  Not an "artsy" picture, but this hole was DEEP and filled with bugs.  *Shudder*


( A bunch more pictures. Cemetery angel heavy :) )

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20090710

The Girl Genius comic for Friday, July 10, 2009 has been posted.

I have lost the index card on which I kept track of the submission history of the zombie coyote story. Now, as I never throw anything away (just ask my poor long-suffering spouse), I know it's here somewhere. But, on the other hand, as I never throw anything away . . .

This is hardly the Fall of Carthage, as tragedies go, but it means that I no longer have a record of where I have and have not subbed that story. And since it was teetering on the verge of being trunked, that means there's an awful lot of markets to which I can no longer say with certainty whether I submitted it or not. (Memory like a steel wossname, yes.) And this in turn makes me feel grumpy and incompetent and who told me I was fit to be let out on my own?

gravediggers

 Here's a trip from Sir Richard Bishop, former member of the amazing true indie band, Sun City Girls, from a live Manchester UK show:


And now the news:

Apparently Universal Studios just won a four-party bidding war to make a movie from the old Atari game, Asteroids.  Here's a scene:


To be produced by the man who produced GI Joe:  The Rise of Cobra, which is on my short list for the worst movie ever made, and written by the master who scripted Race to WItch Mountain.   Unbelievable.  This may well be the nadir of the imagination in Hollywood.  Don't see how they can go lower.

Michael Jackson has not yet risen.

And now the Sports.  Big in my world, tho maybe not in yours, is the first MMA fight card headlined by women:


Although this may not appeal to many women, the sport seems to appeal to more women than boxing has, and it's a big step forward for female fighters--in boxing, the women's superfight never materialized, but next month, Aug 15, it's on in MMA.  Go Cyborg (for those who may not be familiar, Christianne's married name is Cyborg for real.  Her husband, also an MMAer and the more heavily tattooed of the pair, is named Evangelista Cyborg.  I bet they have great Xmas cards.  The Cyborgs would like to wish you and yours....

Reitlinger, Gerald. The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945. 1956. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1981.

---

This is, unfortunately, not a very good book. Mr. Reitlinger lacks the gift of explication almost entirely, and to explain the SS, you need the jumbo super-size gift of explication. Also . . . well, the word that keeps floating around my head is "gossipy." He says things like "Bouhler was a really silly man whom no one thought anything of." His argument, which he finally gets around to making explicit in the last chapter, is buried for most of the book beneath the avalanche of petty details, and I allocated more brain space than should have been necessary to critiquing his paragraph structure.

What he does do well is chart the intensely creepy and unjust process by which, ten years after World War II, those Nazis who weren't either executed within the first couple years or captured by the Russians were being let slide, step by step, out from under. Death sentence commuted to life sentence, and men with life sentences were being let out after ten, or five, or three years. Many Nazis weren't prosecuted at all. Nazi generals were receiving municipal pensions in Germany. Now, I have ethical issues with both capital punishment and long-term incarceration (not to mention extreme doubts about their efficacy), but the way in which the Allies took this grand moral stand--shock! horror! Nuremberg trials!--and then backed down, and down, and down some more, until you get Nazis being presented as martyrs, and being championed by Senator Joseph McCarthy of abhorrèd memory, and simply not being held accountable: that's not justice, either.

Hi all,

Just a little note to let everyone know that I'm taking an extended weekend from work (and life!) starting today. word_ancestry will be back and running on Monday. Hope you all have a great weekend!

-gwoman

[Cross-posted to LJ and Dreamwidth.]

It's a pity: Talebones #`14 has a spooky-evocative bit of cover art, a gray woman android thing with her skin eroded to reveal cogs (or coggish things; I am not a mechanic). Unfortunately, with the exception of one question mark, the entire first half of the issue failed to work for me. Okay, maybe two question marks.

Mark Rigney's "His Master's Voice" involves a musicologist? music anthropologist? meeting up with the Devil. I am inherently suspicious of musician/scholar/etc.-meets-the-Devil stories because, sweet Shinjo on rye, there have been so many of them. It is remotely possible that this is a fine story and an exception, but because it's about the blues and keeps making references to musicians I have never heard of (I am almost completely ignorant of the genre), I can't figure out what the heck is going on. I put this one down to reader/story mismatch, like the endless number of sf stories about baseball that I cannot comprehend at all, and moved on.

I'm going to quote the first few paragraphs of Carrie Vaughn's "Crows" at you to make a point:

Tull awakened under someone else's shield, his legs tangled around his own poleax. He'd fallen--tripped, not struck down. Clumsy. The ground still rumbled with the hoof-falls of a thousand charging horses. The clash of armies still echoed, though distantly. The battle had moved on, sunlight still shone, and he was still alive.

He started to rise, but the shield wouldn't move. Pulling himself with his arms, he slithered out from under it.

The shield was still strapped to his lord's arm. Lord Berold Whiteford, cousin to the King himself, lay on his side, his shield arm flung out, twisted and broken, his sword arm resting over a bleeding gash in his side where the fastening on his breastplate had ripped. His horse, a smoke-gray stallion, lay nearby, a spear imbedded [sic] in its chest. (22)

This has got to be one of the most incredibly boring and generic Eurofantasy story openings ever. The rest of the first section is no better. I could not think of a single reason to continue reading.

Amazingly enough, the story header made things even worse:

Readers often tell her that on the surface her stories look like traditional fantasy stories, with all the usual trappings. "Somewhere along the line something gets a bit twisted, or the perspective gets a bit skewed, and I end up slaughtering unicorns and that sort of thing."

Shinjo in a cinnamon roll, that's the best you can come up with? You start off your stories in a completely boring manner and then the best you can do is kill unicorns? That doesn't even rate. You bet that I (a) bailed and (b) will assiduously avoid this author in the future.

I haven't read the previous two stories in Alan DeNiro's sequence of which the third is "Gepetto's Kiln," but that wasn't what ejected me from the story. I could swear that I've seen DeNiro's poetry in speculative poetry zines, although I can't recall whether I liked it. Some striking imagery in the opening, but dear sweet Shinjo somersaulting, the sentence structures--

The Yellowwood was an Intuitionist vessel [thunk], on a routine assessment of the Montenegro system [thunk], discovered only twenty years before by a caravan of Thoth and human traders [thunk], wandering the galaxy for centuries since the dissolution of the Parameter [thunk], searching for a home for their remains [THUNK]. An old single-star syssem, the red giant would blow in ten thousand years. Matching the dusty mood of its discoverers, resources were found to be scarce throughout Montenegro. (30)

The first quoted sentence makes me cringe. It is practically designed to go thunk-thunk-thunk when you read it aloud (which I didn't, but I hear the words in my head so it's the same effect). The two sentences following it do that [subclause], [main clause] structure thing, which is okay by itself but having them right next to each other just looks awkward. Resulting in three structures that I do not like right on top of each other. I bailed.

Ken Scholes' "The Cowardly Lion's Slipper Wish" might be a perfectly fine poem but I have never read The Wizard of Oz or seen the movie, so I skipped it.

Marie Brennan's (swan_tower) "But Who Shall Lead the Dance?" was the one I bought the issue for and still haven't read because it has a line drawing of a nude woman and I was in the airport.

That's halfway through the content. I was sufficiently discouraged at this point that I said the heck with it and went back to reading Mistborn, which is snarkriffic, but at least is enjoyably snarkriffic.

Full list of nominees here.

It's lovely being nominated for a Canadian award. Despite being in Cardiff right now, I'm feeling as Canadian as possible under the circumstances. Actually, I've been feeling very enthusiastically Canadian all day, as I've battled British dumbed down libraries and the NHS, either of which would be enough to make people emigrate.

Everyone is going to Readercon but me.

Heck, even my friend Shannon is going, only to lug around Vylar's luggage. He asked me if the hotel has cable! He wants to catch up on his NCIS viewing during the con. I don't even know what NCIS is! (I suspect it's about the police if it's off my radar.)

This is me:


:(

So...thank fuck I slept last night. Otherwise, I am quite certain I would now number among the vast legion of future zombies. Truly, yesterday was one of the most inutterably awful days in recent memory, between the sleep deprivation and being so loaded up on hypnotics and rushing to get ready for ReaderCon and running errands and all the rain. Awful, awful day. But last night I slept, goddamn it. About 2:15 a.m., I lay down and shut off the lights, put Pitch Black in the iBook, and slept more than eight hours. Sure, I dreamt of earthquakes and tsunamis, but who cares. I slept.

I'd write about yesterday, but what I can recall mostly doesn't bear repeating, or I'm simply too ashamed to repeat it. Either way, a crappy day. But now it's done, and we move on. Except, I will say that Spooky is a saint for not murdering me yesterday.

Probably the most eventful thing was having to drive down to South County (in a torrential fucking rainstorm,) to check on the farm for Spooky's parents. On the way, we stopped for energy drinks, as we were both only just barely awake. Only, surprise, no Red Bull. So, we made the mistake of trying (it's hard to type this without gagging) Sobe Monster. I didn't think it would be bad. I used to love Sobe Adrenaline, and various other Sobe drinks. But it was unspeakable. Like...I don't know. The juice of rancid bananas and pineapples that had been impregnated with high-fructose corn syrup and then carbonated. Plus, there was 16 ounces of the shit, which seemed completely unnecessary. Really, I've tasted a lot of nasty in my day, but I think that can of Monster set a new standard. I did get it all down, and it did keep me moving. But never, ever, ever again. Red Bull, please. There is photographic evidence of my idiocy behind the cut:

( Kids, don't try this at home )

Oh, and I read "An Enigmatic New Lambeosaurine Hadrosaur (Reptilia: Dinosauria) from the Upper Shale Member of the Campanian Aguja Formation of Trans-Pecos Texas," a weird beast named Angulomastacator daviesi, known thus far only from its boomerang-shaped maxilla bone.

Just heard that Los Angeles spent $1.4 million on Michael Jackson's Memorial thingy. This is the sort of crap that sparks revolt. Well, in sane places, this is the sort of crap that sparks revolt. I will say, it makes Providence having spent $14k on barges from which to launch 4th of July fireworks (when the public libraries can't afford to order new books) seem somewhat less abominable. But only by comparison.

My thanks to Chris (scarletboi), who's getting a new front page for my website up and running, to promote The Red Tree. I think it will be going live within the next day or so. I think. I'll post something here as soon as it does. The new website will gradually become a very dynamic sort of thing, and hopefully it actually will help to promote the new novel (and everything else). By autumn, I hope to be the proud owner of a website that looks like it was created this century.

I will not have any sort of connectivity while at ReaderCon, which is mostly a good thing. So, after tonight, I'll be silent until Sunday night or Monday morning, and that includes my Facebook and my Twitter accounts. My cellphone was new in 2004, and screams at the mention of Facebook and Twitter. Also, I'm going halt the micro-excerpts from The Red Tree until Monday. For those of you attending ReaderCon (many of whom are probably already on their way or have already arrived), I do ask that you please respect my desire not to be photographed. This does not apply to crowd shots, or when I'm doing panels with other guests, obviously. Just the solo presentation stuff, the signing on Saturday, and the reading on Sunday. Thanks.

Okay. Herr Platypus says I'm burning daylight, which seems both obvious and redundant to me...

So! The awesome thing about Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn (Final Empire trilogy #1) is that I have so many complaints about it--seriously, I've spent the first 200 pages or so snarking nonstop at it and it's a marvel that Joe didn't strangle me on the airplane--and yet it is made of pure GLEE. So far as I can tell it is about the (guess!) oppressive Final Empire, ruled by the apparently immortal Lord Ruler, and a group of rebels trying to take the empire down. The prose belongs to the category known as "serviceable," the dialogue clunks along (there is one character--one that I like, ironically enough--who if he uses "my dear" or similar again, I will strangle him), in the first 100 pages out of dozens of male characters there is a single living named female character--

Me: "I'm going to write Brandon Sanderson a stern letter about female characters."
Joe: "Wait till you finish the series, then write."
Me: "Excuse me? I'm 100 pages into a 600-page novel and there's one living female named character! This is not making a good first impression on me."
Joe: "Fair enough."

I think a second one with a name has shown up since then, for approximately three pages. ROAR. And I don't like most of the characters, although thankfully none of them is a Quinn Dexter.

And yet! You can feel the doom oozing off the pores of the page (remember, I liked K.J. Parker's Scavenger trilogy). There is an extremely cool magic system based on metals, not all of which actually exist. (Someone out there sells authorized jewelry based on the series, little vials of metal flakes like they have in the books; I came across the site while looking something up for Joe. I am curious as to what they are using for the made-up metal, but not curious enough to buy the jewelry, especially since I don't know how to identify things anyway.) The plot is engaging--it's one of those things where it's actively fun to guess what the twists are. God knows I'm not reading this for the deathless prose.

( Spoilery bits. )

Anyway! I have decided that I do not even care about good writing anymore. I just want to be entertained. And chewy worldbuilding and doom are entertaining to me, and as long as the prose doesn't make me cringe, I'm good. In fact, ambitious prose that fails is more likely to turn me off. In the next installment I will tell you of my unfortunate encounter with an issue of Talebones (there was one story in there I had bought the issue for that I did not get to read because--I had forgotten to check because I'm not used to zines being illustrated--it had an artistic nude illustration and I was in the airport and...yeah) in which I bounced of all the stories but one and probably all the poems as well. Or maybe I should just spare you the snark.

Life and Stuff

My mom reads my blog, but she only likes the entries where I talk about how things are going in my life. Usually, I don't use this blog to write about things unless I think they're of interest to most of you, but you know, moms are important.

We just got a window air conditioner unit for our upstairs because our central air conditioner just can't handle the top floor. We have a tall house with three floors, so our top floor is like an attic in terms of temperature. In other words, hot in the summertime. Of course, other than a short stretch a few weeks ago, this is a bizarrely cold summer. We all had to wear long pants and jackets on July 4th for the fireworks, which is really strange. 

July 4th, however, was a lot of fun. After a cookout with friends, we went to park along Lake Michigan to get a good spot for fireworks. A few of us played Who Would Win? while we waited for it to get dark. The fireworks were amazing, and we had very close, very good "seats" on our blankets on the grass. Who Would Win? is from Gorilla Games and is amazingly fun. Highly recommended.

Milwaukee is a great place to be in the summer. It's as though they try to cram a year's worth of fun into about three months. There's not just a  cool music or ethnic festival every weekend, there's multiple such fests. I was walking around the city today and in one direction I saw them setting up for Bastille Days (a French festival) and in the other I saw them setting up tents for the Circus Parade Festival (apparently, it's like a traditional circus but x10). And it's not just on the weekends. Free concerts, shows, street faires, and big events go on every evening. You couldn't do half of it all if you tried.

Although sometimes, you just have to stay home and relax. I had intended on spending this evening immersed in computer files and whatnot. See, yesterday I got a great deal on a new desktop PC and snapped it up. It's funny how buying a new computer has become an event of such joy and such hassle all mixed together. It's exciting to have a new, better computer, but it's also a pain to set it all up.

For the last three years I've used a laptop (with a docking station and a proper keyboard, mouse, and monitor when at my desk), but this was, as I said, a great deal and I was in need of an upgrade, although the laptop will still serve me well as, well, a laptop. However, I just assumed that it would have a wireless adapter. You know what happens when you assume. You make an ass out of you and Dell. Honestly, wireless connections and networks are so common, I'm surprised they even sell non-wireless computers. Upon further examination, however, it turns out, not only do they, but they still sell a lot of them. So now I wait until the wireless adapter I just ordered with a big black box sitting on my desk. Honestly, there's really no use in even turning the darn thing on until I can get it hooked up to our local network and the Internet.

Tomorrow we're going to the Comedy Sportz championship tournament, which is a gathering of improv comedy troupes from all over the country. I'm expecting hilarity. Friday, I think I'm going to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Ghostbusters with a viewing. Saturday, another cookout and then off to see Fountains of Wayne in concert.  Sunday, maybe one of the two festivals I mentioned, or maybe just relaxing at home.

Lastly, I leave you with this. It's a video of a musician wronged by United Airlines getting the only revenge he can. Apparently, when this started making the rounds on Monday, United suddenly decided to help him out. Imagine that. I think the best part about it is that it's actually a catchy little tune. Creativity and talent wins the day.