Caught in the Tuna Net

I wish I had pictures for you.

One oldie but goodie is (or was, I haven’t checked it recently) a large sign in the middle of the Route 270 spur as seen approaching from south, just off the Beltway around D.C. It says: Welcome to the I-270 Technology Corridor, or something similar, and sits in front of a thick stand of trees.

I just saw another wonderful one from the MARC train going to work yesterday. I’d forgotten my iPod earbuds (oy) so was awake and looking out the window as we whipped over the Beltway going south. There, another sign saying something like “New Luxury Condos from $450k” (some ridiculous price) and just after it, seen through a light screen of trees, a ruined block of concrete apartments. Yay!

If you wonder where the FAIL thing came from, visit the Fail Blog.

Perforce, I am writing up a lot of the station histories for the Great American Stations web site. Being a lover of the odd and offbeat, the absurd, the silly meme, I am including fun weird facts in the writeups. I’d like to actually see these charming oddities some day. I shall add these as I find them.

High Point, NC

High Point is also home to the “World’s Largest Chest of Drawers,” a building built in 1926 to call attention to the city as “Home Furnishings Capital of the World.” This building has been restored as a four-story beautiful 18th century chest of drawers, which has been the home to the High Point Jaycees.

Gainesville, GA

…Gainesville is also near the Kangaroo Conservation Center, the largest kangaroo collection and preserve outside of Australia. This privately owned facility engages in both captive breeding and public education, and currently has 300 kangaroos of nine species, as well as other Australasian fowl, reptiles, and marsupials.

There are a lot of those…I will refrain from discussing the candidates in the upcoming U.S. presidential elections, who have a lot of Hmmm value.  Except for Sarah Palin, who is so darn Hmmmable that I have to say… WHO thought it was a good idea to invite that jumped-up thug to the party?

Ahem. Sorry.

Overheard at the recent Plone conference:

So he comes to me and asks to have Second Life installed on his computer, and I told him that it was a big pain to do and it would mess up his computer really bad. The truth of the matter is that I just couldn’t explain bondage furries to him—which would be the first thing he saw when he got there.

Yep, bondage furries are really hard to explain. I do not know WHY people in governmental agencies feel the need to get their institutes (as in NIH, for example) space on facebook. Recruiting? Hah. Likely story. Recruiting for what? More importantly, recruiting whom? Scientists with kinks?

Then there’s this thing where bad-tempered middle-aged men dress up in Sailor Moon outfits and go to anime or science fiction conventions. And the costumes are rumpled. It’s a cosplay thing, I know. But really…is this a good idea? Why are they so grumpy? The costume doesn’t seem to be helping.

Then there was the day where I went out at lunch time to go down the block to the bank. I work in an office inside Washington Union Station, so yeah, there is the usual cast of urban characters hanging around outside. There’s this one guy who stands in his special spot that I have to pass when I go to the bank a block down Massachussetts Avenue. He has a phone head set most days, but I happen to know that he’s talking to himself out loud. That day, no head set. And he was casting aspersions upon someone political at the top of his lungs—well, hell, the Capitol is only a stones throw away, why not?—and then he said to himself, loudly, “I AM NOT HERE TO SOCIALIZE.”

Elevator shafts are like the world’s largest shower stalls. Oh my. When I got back inside the building, and was waiting for the elevator up…one of the elevators was out of service, being renovated & worked on, so that shaft was open and just covered up by a plywood shed arrangement while the guys inside sawed, hammered, drilled, and banged around. Some workman was also singing at the top of his lungs, something cheery and very pop.  That made me smile.

17 October 2008

The police chief of Amtrak broadcasts an email:

“There are workers on the roof of Union Station. No cause for alarm.”

And there are workers UNDER the roof, too! (Nothing to see here, move along.) They’d already posted an email about this, mind you. Who was bothering the police chief about window washers? *sigh*

I spent almost all of the past weekend at Gaylaxicon 2008 in Bethesda, Maryland, and I’m really glad I did. If you don’t know, Gaylaxicon is a rather boutique science fiction convention that is given yearly by the Gaylactic Network, a smallish but national fan organization. It’s generally very civilized and small. If you are a GLBT fan who likes science fiction/fantasy/horror this is a great thing. If you are a fan of GLBT sci fi/fantasy/horror, this is also for you. They draw several small press owners and reps, and that provides a lot of the “boutique” I spoke of.

Back last summer one of the ConComm wrote and invited me to be a guest—a speak on panels and amuse the attendees sort of thing—probably since I was the Artist GOH in 2000. It took me a while to get my head together on the subject and I did reply in the affirmative in August. Organizational issues not withstanding, Peter (who was doing registration) was gracious enough to let me in as a guest. Kay had to pay her own way, so I bought her lunch both days. The things she’ll do for sushi, honestly.

I got a much warmer reception than I expected, really, given that Kay and I were fairly cheesed off when we withdrew from those groups almost seven years ago. However, the hatchet’s been buried—and not in anyone’s head. The Gaylactic Network folks are decent people. As an organization, it has its flaws, but no more or less than many such. We ain’t none of us perfect. I’m glad that their current Speaker (president) is minded to make some changes, and I wish him luck with it. I just don’t have the time or energy to devote to that again—and Kay and I tried to make changes, too. Hopefully we planted some seeds way back then, and Wayne can make it work now.

Their current webgeek, Andrew, asked me what we could do with their site, and what do you know? The Open Source CMS that I use for the Great American Stations web site (I’m the site producer and webmother) is primarily a community-building tool. Hah. Building a Plone site is no picnic, let me tell you. However, it’s not that awful if you use a lot of the out-of-the-box features. Tweaking the skin really hard, however, as we did at Amtrak, is a trying enterprise. The learning curve can be steep, in that case. Nonetheless, Plone will let you build a really useful object base and let you concoct custom views into it. The Network needs something that will help them create a knowledge base, and special hosting needs aside, this will do the trick.

So, back to the convention. I sat on two panels, “How do you like your women,” and “Erotica in the Genre.” Egad! Smut AND geekification. Can it get any better? I don’t think so. The first panel didn’t do much, since opinion panels are full of…well, opinons. Boring. I sat and looked out upon the four or five women who had wandered in and they gazed back unconcernedly. I whispered to the butch next to me, who whispered back. Bad manners, that. Sorry. We all agree that Amanda Tapping is Hot. So is Gina Torres.

The second panel was quite interesting in that it talked about how mainstream or not erotica had gotten for sci fi/fantasy/horror (in books and media), and the GOH, Geoff Ryman, was fun to listen to. No, not THAT kind of interesting. Many useful writerish tidbits in that discussion. An interesting observation: men having the sort of romantic relationships women write about (especially in slash) IS the fantasy part of the story…which I thought was pretty funny. It made me think that what I’ve written isn’t too far off the mark, in terms of describing believable males.

Geoff also said something along the lines of men’s taste in erotica basically stultifying at age 13. Delicately put, that’s a partner ready to do the deed around every corner. This is interesting in light of people’s comments read on the DAZ3D Commons in a recent debate on the subject of “Have Women Lost Their Femininity,” which provided weeks of entertainment and many fine opportunities for absurdity. There were several gentlemen who allowed that they do say no, from time to time. Or that they just can’t find someone appropriate. In other words, they sounded like adults…but that’s real life, not fiction. No telling what they fantasize about…but of course, a look at their 3D Poser galleries would tell you in an instant.

All in all, things went rather better than expected. I did talk to Alicia Austin at length, as well as Geoff Ryman, and enjoyed both conversations immensely. Alicia’s been in fandom as an illustrator for donkey’s years, and her fine draftsmanship hasn’t wavered in all this time. She’s quite a lovely, down-to-earth person, too. Geoff is droll, witty, and Englishy. Kay got her sushi lunch, we caught up with old friends, and made some new ones. Well done. Thank you, Kay, for kicking my butt and making me go.

About four years ago I stopped doing a lot of 3-d art—or any art for that matter—because I got a job that pretty much ate my brain. I had been laid off and trying to get work for eight or nine months and took a job at Real Magnet doing both email template design and help desk. This was the sort of job where I came home after a day of beyond-intense work and I just couldn’t talk, much less do anything else.

OK, two years of that. No creative stuff going on, much, but the people at Real Magnet are and were the best, which made up for a lot of the pressure. Then I moved on to a position at Amtrak as a production designer for the Great American Stations project. Then my mother died…then my grandmother…talk about transitions.

This winter past, the dam that had been keeping me from writing for oh, a couple of decades, finally broke. At this point, I have 3+ books in a series drafted, and nobody is more surprised than I am. The fourth is meandering and having plot issues, so I write on it a little bit at a time, and started back with Poser to depict the characters in the books, whom I call my figments.

The figments share a brain with me, as my figments always have over the years. They wanted to be portrayed, since I can do that pretty handily with Poser and Photoshop. Isn’t that neat? I can “photograph” people who have never existed. So, the 3d gallery at this point is populated with the current crop of figments from the Master of Sorrows trilogy (plus).

I also went back to the DAZ3D forums, and post regularly there again, and have fun being very silly with the excellent people there. They’re a real cut above your usual grotesqueries on the ‘Net. If you’re there, I’m the Nanobot. Of course.

It could be said that I flit from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, but that’s not exactly true. I spiral through them, coming back time after time. I figure that I’m supposed to do a bunch of different things, and well, I like variety, so I switch off. I’m trying, since life is short, to focus better now. Follow-through. Persistence. Words like those.

If there weren’t a magnificent August sunbeam from the skylights making my bed feel like a frying pan, I would be asleep and trying to breathe while lying down with this miserable flu.

Instead, I’m trying to make some progress with re-skinning this blog. Must re-skin something. After spending a couple of years with Plone, PHP and WprdPress seem a little crude, though they certainly do the job. Figuring out why the path to the theme’s images directory works in one place but not another…Oy. Same old problems, different CMS.  But it’s getting there. I use two fixed “faux columns” in my site’s layout, this is just a different arrangement of the same thing. I should be able to do this. Mind you, I’d do it faster if I weren’t semi-delirious.

My boss reminded me to annoy Kaiser P. into seeing me today. Alas, yesterday, someone over at Kaiser called someone, not me, and left a message for me. How inconsiderate of those (unknown) people not to pass it along! Maybe Kaiser will actually call me back today and I can spend several hours of waiting with other sick people to get something to cope with this sinus infection from a vastly over-worked physician. For this I pay a lot of money.

Code doesn’t care if I can’t breathe through my nose. Code in da nose? Hah.

My boss, a gracious lady I admire and respect (no, I’m not just sucking up) speaks of techies as not speaking English.  I completely understand that sentiment. Some geeks are not as good at it as others.  That business about “faux columns” for instance: there really are two columns of text on the web page…on the other hand, there are no columns, no text, and no web page, just a lot of little bits of light glowing out at me from this flat panel monitor. It’s consciousness and pattern-matching ability that makes sense of any of it. “This is not a pipe,” as Rene Magritte, would say.  “There is no spoon,” as a fictional character once opined.

Mmph. Back to consciousness, of which I am in short supply.  Now, where did I put that pixel???

First post. Hello, world!

I have spoken to others in my small circle–people who have a lot more to say about the world than I do, generally–about starting their own blogs. Curiously, they tend to dig their heels in and refuse. My father, who generally has the most fascinating things to say of almost anyone I’ve ever met, mostly because he’s had a ringside seat at a lot of 20th century history, is mum.  Another beloved, Horgan (H.L. Schurr) who has the best rants, ever, is also word-shy. Dad has written nine fiction books full of cool stuff, mixing science fiction with memoirs. Morgan…has at least nine books worth of fantasy and steam-punk ideas stored away. I’ve seen six pages so far, and they’re quite fine. I wish they’d find a way to write publicly. I’m a freaking web master. I built and customized Dad’s (empty) blog, also a Wordpress thing. Yo, Morgan! I’ll host your blog, too!

“Hello world” is one of those things you always do when you first learn to program in a new language. I’ve lost count of the number of languages I’ve programmed in. Hmm…uh…Basic, Assembly, VAX VMS (is that a language? maybe not), Fortran IV, C, maybe a smidgen of Visual Basic, LISP, oh, what is that thing that’s a lot like C that they used to use for undergraduate CS people? And then there is web tech scripting: PHP, XHTML, CSS, a little Python… my memory fails me. If you don’t use them daily, you lose the details.

When I was in undergraduate engineering at the University of Virginia, they had their own humanities department in the engineering school, and they made us read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, of which I remember little except that every chapter was Chapter One. Always Hello World, always Chapter One.  Whew. And then I look around one day and ta-da! I’ve written a 500-page draft of a novel! Whoa.

And yes, I’m actually on the fourth book of a series. No, I haven’t really edited them properly. This one’s meandering around, keeping me company, basically, but it hasn’t bothered to tell me HOW I’m going to get there (plot points) from here. It will in time, I’m sure. Always the first step. Always with the patience.

And, eventually, I’ll be updating this silly blue theme to match the rest of the site. Of course, by saying this, I’ve doomed myself…