Lab Notes

carrie@the-villainess.com — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 01:18:13 GMT

So, if one receives a chiding letter from a utility company, the emotionally healthy and rational response is to go out and buy some new books, right?

... in my defense, they were paperbacks.

carrie@the-villainess.com — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 23:36:34 GMT

Ok, well, I had to send ninja rats to chew through the cord, but we should be ok now.

carrie@the-villainess.com — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 15:50:30 GMT

Friggin' cheap jack Internet Contagin Disperser has a stuck on/off switch.

This thing better not be military surplus, is all I'm sayin'.

Anyone have any lube?

(for the switch, perv.)

carrie@the-villainess.com — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 15:53:17 GMT

I see that the new internet contagin diffuser I got for my birthday works like a champ with the orbital mind control ray I got last year.

Lay back and enjoy the love-in.

carrie@the-villainess.com — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 18:32:20 GMT

Tuesday, 1 March 2005: 500 words, all on the untitled novel
Wednsday, 2 March 2005: 200 words, all on the untitled novel
Thursday, 3 March 2005: 200 words, all on the untitled novel

I wish I could think of a title. 'The Flight of the...' whatever I decide to call the protag's vehicle would make sense, but for some reason it rubs me the wrong way. Sounds cliche or something. I was calling it The Auk in my head but this is a poor idea for several reasons, firstly because the trilogy which it was supposed to be part of, each volume of which would have been named after an extinct bird, mutated into a single book with vesitgal subplot appendages, and secondly because people who ask for it in the library will be in danger of getting an ornithology journal instead.

carrie@the-villainess.com — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 04:21:38 GMT

Shaun of the Dead is really quite a good movie, actually.

HOWEVER...

I would really like to know why it is that if I spot a character in a movie, hollywood or indie, whom I find attractive, and the things s/he says are intelligent and seem reasonable responses to the situation at hand, and s/he has more than a three-minute bit part*, then it is virtually a sure bet that a.) all the other characters will hate him/her and gang up on him/her, and b.) s/he will be humiliated and dismissed throughout the movie, culminating in the point where c.) s/he dies, usually a messier, more on-screen death than the other characters will get treated to.

(Please note that it does not follow that all the characters who get humiliated and die onscreen win my sympathy. I hate the comic relief just as much as you do.)

Sometime I ought to smite all mankind, in vengeance for this obscure cultural trend. Besides, it'd probably be a lark, smiting.

*I love you, Howard, Chemist

carrie@the-villainess.com — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 12:27:34 GMT

Hunter Thompson croaked himself. I don't really know what to say about this except, Fuck.

Banned Book Meme

carrie@the-villainess.com — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 02:21:41 GMT

List of the top 110 banned books. (I don't know from when or wherethis list was derived, although I definitely see books that must have attained their 'banned' status in the old USSR.) Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some. I didn't do the underline thing, because really, eventually I'm going to read all of these, except maybe Gone with the Wind, if I live long enough.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

carrie@the-villainess.com — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 03:25:18 GMT

Finally saw friggin' Napolean Dynamite. Which is nice, because now I understand people's icon references (just in time for them all to disappear before the sweep of the new Hip Reference Du Jour, no doubt) and also because it really was honestly quite a good movie, if sort of fuzzy. Basically, it had me from the part where he opens the schoolbus window at the beginning. I had forgotten how annoying schoolbus windows are, and the memory put me right back in high school in a tactile sense. But without making me curl up into fetal position, which I am assured that, for instance, Welcome to the Dollhouse would do.

(I have to say that when LaFawnda got off the bus, I was subconsciously bracing for the joke where she was either 300 pounds or a transexual or both, especially after the throwaway line about how she only sent headshots. I wonder if that was set up to be a very subtle joke about the audience's expectations, or just basic honesty. Either way it was good.)

carrie@the-villainess.com — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:09:33 GMT

Just read Windhaven by George R. R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle. I was a bit worried from the cover blurb that it was going to be another tedious coming-of-age/overcoming-oppressive-traditions fantasy, but it was much deeper than that. GRRM has not let me down yet, and Lisa Tuttle has earned herself a new fan.

Idoru

carrie@the-villainess.com — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 18:59:18 GMT

Finished Idoru by William Gibson over lunch.

First impressions:

I'm impressed that anyone said anything about the nature of celebrity in 1996 that can be read today without seeming either outdated or old hat.

This is the first of Gibson's works that I have read; I'm pleasantly surprised by the sheer quality of his prose.

One thing that I was dissatisfied with, however, was the resolution of the Kathy Torrance subplot. In the context of Tokyo and the Lo/Rez organization, her threats really don't seem to be the sort of thing that would hurt Laney, especially since Gibson's gone out of the way to establish that Laney has no family or friends that she can damage. I suppose it can be argued that it's his very lack of intimates, plus his history, that makes him so protective of his reputation, but I just didn't get that from his character (plus, if that's true of him, it makes him a huge hypocrite for ever working for Slitscan at all, and there's no moment of realization that would point to that, just regret for the people he hurt.) It just seemed like a ploy, first to bring her back into the picture, and then to have Blackwell do what he does. It seemed show-offy.

Other than that, I thought it was quite good. The other characters were fairly logical in their development, and I especially appreciated the world-building - detailed enough to seem real, but without any infodumping and with little bits of things trailing off the edges of the story, as it were, to lend wersimillitude.

carrie@the-villainess.com — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 03:50:59 GMT

So I finally read The Last Days of Socrates.

It reads to me like Socrates would have been featured on fandom_wank at least as often as conuly.

Maybe it's just the translation I have, though. The religious prostelytizing in the introduction and the random personal opinions interjected by the translator into the endnotes do not give me heaps and heaps of confidence in my cheap, elderly, beer-stained Penguin edition.

carrie@the-villainess.com — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 15:26:03 GMT

Saw the most amazing movie on Sundance the other night. 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould. It really got into the isolation and weirdness of being driven by your art, without glamourising it the way I feel, for instance, Shine did but also without making Mr. Gould into a freak show for viewing delectation. And the ending really got to me, but I won't spoil it.

carrie@the-villainess.com — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 15:49:17 GMT

To be brutally honest, I've never liked the 'muse' thing either. From my (admittedly less than all-encompassing) experience with writer's groups, I've found that people who claim to have muses, get blinding flashes of inspiration, have stories that 'run away with them', or write based on a strong sense of an individual character's personality rather than a plot or theme idea produces work that appeals less to me personally than those writers who plan and stay in control. Also, the idea that some muse comes down and whispers a chapter in your ear reminds me of the sorts of people who tell me that God will help me get over pinkeye, and when I tell them that the doctors and my immune system will take care of that, they tell me that God created doctors and my immune system. Way to take genuine human effort out of the picture.

carrie@the-villainess.com — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 02:59:41 GMT

I decided to put another little piece of my original fiction up on my website. Like "The Squirrels Are Not What They Seem", "The Ultimate Battle Between Good and Evil" is pretty whimsical, but it does touch on themes I often explore in my work, so I thought it might be of interest to some.

I was never a big Pantera fan, but this irked me...

carrie@the-villainess.com — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 17:35:49 GMT

So, on the bus this morning the driver had the radio tuned to 'I100', which is a cheesy classic/ contemporary rock thing with an awful morning DJ.*

Awful Morning DJ (I think his name is Tony but I'll just call him AMDJ) and his vapid female sidekick were reading off the news, and they discussed the Pantera shooting a little bit.

First, they were saying how no one knew the motive yet, and were rattling off some theories about the deranged fan thing, upset about Pantera breaking up, etc. etc... and then AMDJ said something about crystal meth possibly being involved and the vapid sidekick said "Oh, I have no doubt it was" or something to that effect.

Now how the hell would she know? The article on CNN isn't even mentioning crystal meth as a possibility, and even if the idea is being floated other places, I doubt she was there at the event or performed the autopsy on the guy, so there is no way she could possibly be in a position to be sure that crystal meth was involved. That's just sloppy behavior for a newsreader.

Then they segued into how great it was that the cop who was present was able to shoot the guy before even more people got hurt. And they're right, it is great**. But then they started gabbling about how so often cops have it so hard, and they're not allowed to shoot the bad guys without having their hands tied by a bunch of paperwork....

Buzzawha? I'm sorry, but that's apples and oranges. There is a murky grey area in the kinds of cases where a cop shoots because he thinks, or says he thinks, or in the heat of the moment confusedly thinks, that someone has a gun and it turns out they have a wallet or a hoagy or something. In those cases you have to judge what was going on in the cop's mind, which is hard if not impossible in some cases. But AFTER SOMEONE HAS SHOT SEVERAL PEOPLE, it's not hard to follow the thought process that would lead you to think he has a gun! The mean bad liberals aren't trying to stop police from shooting people in situations like this. The only way I could see someone second-guessing the cop in this instance is if he had shot the hostage. Which he didn't. Or possibly, just maybe, if there had been a reasonable method to rapidly bring the shooter into custody with sub-lethal force, which there wasn't on hand from what I can tell. I don't think that this cop has anything to fear from the Big Bad Paperwork (which frankly is there not only to protect the mean bad criminals, but also ordinary folks, from overzealousness and/or self-interested behavior by people whom we've given a great deal of power, including firepower.)

After that I stopped listening.

*At least it wasn't tuned to the country-western station that the other bus driver favors. I LOVE roots music, Johnny Cash, the Carter family, the folk tradition of the rural whites of the south (I also love the folk tradition of the rural blacks of the south, of the urban people of all areas and races, of Mexicans and Brits, etc. I'm a big sucker for folk traditions.) It's precisely for that reason that I fucking LOATHE what corporate Nashville radio country-western has become. Also, for some reason that station had "She's in Love with the Boy" on heavy rotation, and of all the country songs I hate, I think that I hate that one the most, excepting the collected worths of Toby Keith.

**Relatively speaking, of course. Really great would be all this shit not happening.

Crossposted to my livejournal.

Like Christmas in... well, December

carrie@the-villainess.com — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 02:40:10 GMT

I finally got back into my web hosting account and updated my site.

carrie@the-villainess.com — Mon, 08 Nov 2004 16:34:50 GMT

Well, that was a bit unpleasant.

There was this election, you see. With lies and screaming and death and war and apocalypse and stupid people running amuck all the hell over and trying to get into our lovely forests and mountains and pretending to be nice to psych us out and then there were creepy machines and scary angry cavemen and roaring tyrannicori! And one of my rats got lost and I had to dig under the dresser to find her and I couldn't concentrate on work and I couldn't sleep and I think I'm working up another kidney stone and OMG!KILLER METEOR! and seven-legged calves and eclipses of the moon and the Harvard/Cornell hockey game. And motorcycles and voodoo cats and tragedy.

And then to add insult to injury they started teaching Creationism in Wisconsin, which is supposed to be one of ours, dammit.

SO I haven't got much work done on the NaNoWriMo project. I'm at 1,380 words in fact.

I did decide to scrap almost all the work I did on the first half of my first novel (aka 'the first book') and cut it back to a prologue and six chapters before moving directly into the second half of the novel (aka 'the second book'.) This will allow me to refocus on my original vision and have a stronger narrative/ thematic thread through the whole thing, befitting a singular work rather than a trilogy.

NaNoWriMo, Day 1

carrie@the-villainess.com — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 03:57:51 GMT

882 words.

Not enough.

The wind-up...

carrie@the-villainess.com — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:09:15 GMT

Did 3000 words of warm-up material for NaNoWriMo: cast list, settings, and minibios for the main characters.

Haven't been getting much reading done lately.

We saw Rasputina in Buffalo last weekend. I've been wanting to see them for a long time. They played The New Zero, which is my all-time favorite Rasputina track, as one of the encores. Overall a very good show. We missed one of the opening bands, but the other one, Global Village Idiot, was.... interesting. The lead singer could go from crooner to cartoon in seconds. She was cute too.

That's all for now.

Well, now I've done it

carrie@the-villainess.com — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 16:07:37 GMT

Signed up for NaNoWriMo again. No, I'm not done editing last year's model. Yes, I'm a self-indulgent suck.

Apparently it's time to meme!

carrie@the-villainess.com — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 02:16:50 GMT

Note: Since some of the fannish opinions of mine which are most vehemently unpopular in certain segments of fandom(s) are pretty well chill with other segments of fandom(s), notably my distaste for certain ships and my dubiousity about J.K. Rowling's status as an Ethicist of Note, I will let them be in favor of something more out-of-the-way. That is, I will attempt not to duplicate opinions, however agreeable, that have already appeared on my friends-list.

1.) (General) The coolest character in any work of fiction is the mad scientist or equivalent, followed closely by the treacherous advisor or equivalent. Lead villians can, sadly, be almost as dull as heroes

2.) (ASOIAF) Arya and Sansa started off in a stereotypical 'two sisters, one tomboy, one girly-girl' situation. Given what we know of George R. R. Martin and the series so far, it is safe to say that this is another fantasy stereotype among so many that he is preparing to turn on its head. Writing off Sansa as a whiny little female because she knows needlework and has the temerity to develop romantic crushes on cute boys at the cynical, hormone-free age of thirteen means that you are falling for Martin's set-up, mark my words.

3.) (ASOIAF) Also, Sandor Clegane? He's one of those characters with whom Martin demonstrates that fascinating breakthrough in fantasy writing, moral complexity. He is not a romantic hero/ badass with a heart of gold. He's a badass with a heart of muscle tissue, a bunch of hangups, and the decency not to rape a barely teenage girl at the last possible moment. Good for him, but that doesn't mean he's said teenager's Twoo Luv and that he's going to marry her.

4.) (HP) I don't get what's supposed to be so annoying about OotP Ginny or Movie!Hermione. I can take the ladies or leave them, but I don't get this galloping desire to kill them, and half the time in the name of feminism. Excessively veneer-thin perfection in women fits in perfectly with the excessively veneer-thin perfection of the putatively good men in the books. It's all of a piece. Kind of a stupid piece, but a piece nevertheless.

5.) (HP) I still don't care what anybody motherfucking well says, consistent untempered bravery can just as easily be a vice as a virtue.

6.) (SFlit) There are certain writers who may (or may not) be very nice, interesting, classic, etc., but when I see them quoted in a sig file I get doubts about the person quoting them. These include Heinlein, Rand, Hesse, and Gaiman.

7.) (ASOIAF) RT+LS /= JS

8.) (TMNT) Baxter Stockman is the most interesting character in either series, and provides a rich allegorical subtext in his evolution through the various mediums in which he has appeared. He's also hot.

9.) (HP) Ok, one 'popular' unpopular opinion. Dumbledore is Up to No Good. He's got a cult of personality going on and cults of personality are always creepy. I still think he's stirring up shit with Dark Wizards deliberately in order to assure his continued power through blood sacrifice.

10.) (General) Even good books should not be so thick they fall out of their binding the first time I read them. Thank you. Goodnight.

carrie@the-villainess.com — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 23:03:17 GMT

Went to the Friends of the Library Sale.

Got two Ernest Thompson Seton books, a book on self-defense, an early collection of GRRM's short stories, a nice hardcover copy of Frankenstein to replace my paperback, The Woman Who Never Evolved by Hrady, and Pimp by Peter Whitfield (a cute little paperback expose from the 70s.)

My former boss picked up a signed Carl Sagan book for me too.

Joint Review: A Canticle for Leibowitz and A Case of Conscience

carrie@the-villainess.com — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 23:15:24 GMT

So, to add to my Mary Sunshine disposition, I'm going to review

I read A Canticle for Leibowitz just after WorldCon. It was a sad case. I thought it began very promisingly, but around the point where the abbot was using his own ineptitude in beating a cat to death with a shovel as a reason to condemn a small child to a brief life of misery, I felt like beating the author to death with a shovel. I will have to say that it framed the question honestly - Thon Thaddeo's argument was one I could absolutely agree with. The Church never has offered any solution to suffering and ignorance except to say that solving such problems is dangerous/ irrelevant, as people are not perfect. Of course they're not perfect, but if you fuck around til they're perfect you'll fuck around forever and the level of human misery will just stay the same or get worse. At least if you try to improve things, they'll improve a little.

Then I read A Case of Conscience. I had been told that it was thought-provoking and open-ended. And honestly, it didn't make me blood-spittingly angry, perhaps because the priest character was flawed and conflicted, and not in a cute, Mary-Sue, look at these charming quirks way like the monks of CfL. On the other hand, the obligatory 'agnostic' was a crude, dishonest, violent asshole. The alien race was a more fair case of real atheists, but of course the point of them was to demonstrate that charming, honest, moral creatures can come straight from Satan. Which I know is a real issue that certain extremely convinced Christians who have to face fine specimens of atheism like me in real life have to deal with. Seriously. Ok, so it blows my mind a little. The thing that really frustrated me about CoC, though, was that I felt that the author cheated more in terms of bringing the conclusion out of his ass rather than his narrative.

What have I learned? First, that being the author is fun, because you can force the world you create to agree with your philosophy (but hey, we all do it to some degree) and second, that I have a far harder time suspending my disbelief for the theology of the Catholic Church, accepted by millions across the world as literal truth, than for a mere little thing like dragons or zombies or vampires or invisible magical schools that are pulling hundreds of students out of a highly civilized and documented culture without repercussions. And thirdly, that I probably won't read The Fall of the Sparrow until I've cleansed my palate with some non-fiction.

carrie@the-villainess.com — Sat, 25 Sep 2004 01:51:46 GMT

Cranky. Consistently on 'wrong' side of recent wanks. Cramps. New computer arriving October 1st, which for all practical purposes starts a 2 month NaNoWriMo for me, as I need to finish the second draft of The Novel before starting on a new novel (which, fortunately, has an actual title, so I won't need to assign them roman numerals.) Still haven't decided what, if anything, to post about the last two days of WorldCon. Have several book reviews that I ought to be doing too. So what do I do? I write an essay for my far-distant-future project, priority #1003, the Encyclopedia of Mad Scientists.

At least I wrote something.