Ordinary Day

This just got brought to my attention on Twitter by fellow Carina author Nicole Luiken: the husband-and-wife team that write under the name Ilona Andrews have this post up today as an April Fools gag, for a book which does not actually exist.

And as soon as I saw it I saw why Nicole pointed me at it, because that cover guy? LOOKS MIGHTY FAMILIAR, doesn’t he?

So yeah, apparently Ilona Andrews and Carina Press pull from the same pool of hot cover models. >:D BRB, laughing forever!

(Also, HI to any Ilona Andrews readers who drop by!)

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

My alarm clock has a long and glorious history of jolting me out of dreams before they get to the really good part. This morning, it interrupted my subconscious just as it was trying to, of all things, act out an Elvis movie!

Now as you know, Bob Internets, I have seen many an Elvis movie in my time. I know how these plots work. And this one was set up perfectly: it had poor-and-broody-and-honest Elvis competing with slightly-skeevy-rich-boy, played in this particular movie by Brendan Fraser, competing for my affections. When the alarm clock went off I distinctly remember that Rich Boy had just given me a Kindle Fire and was trying to get me to agree to watch a bunch of anime with him. I was in the middle of protesting that not only did I have two ereaders already, but he’d also set up the Kindle with my actual Amazon account. Which I had not given him access to. (C.f. the ‘skeevy’ part of the character archetype here!)

I also remember a scene just before that bit, where I was out on a dock with Elvis’ character, and we were having the obligatory initial Bonding With Each Other Over Shared Background scene. I was making rueful commentary about my background with my father. But since this was indeed early in the plot, Elvis’ character got cranky at me, thinking I was making commentary about his father. (Boy howdy, do I know how these plots work. >:D)

I am somewhat disgruntled that we never got to the part where Elvis wins the day (and by day I mean girl, and by girl I mean me) when I get to overhear him belting out a suitably mournful love song. In fact, Elvis didn’t get to sing anything in this dream before I woke up. Which I suppose was my brain trying to follow the Murkworks Law of Elvis Movie Quality, i.e., that the quality of any given Elvis movie is inversely proportional to the number of songs in it (unless that movie is King Creole).

Well played, brain. Next time, though, if you really want to up the ante, make the rival another musician, and make him Quebecois. And have Elvis whip out a bouzouki.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

If you have access to a command shell on your computer and you have the traceroute command available, type this, for lo, there are lols to be found. No other hints shall be given!

traceroute 216.81.59.173

(For those of you who don’t know what traceroute is, it’s a command that shows you all the hops necessary to go from your computer to the computer you’re trying to get the route to. It shows the names and IP addresses of intervening hosts.)

If you don’t have immediate access to a command line, click over to rmd‘s LJ where she has thoughtfully captured the output for your amusement!

H/t to both rmd and my own belovedest solarbird!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

One of the side effects of spazzkat playing all this Skyrim here at the Murk: I’ve totally gotten back onto a Nethack kick.

I had a great game going, and fired up the save file from yesterday’s run tonight. I was in Sokoban and died horribly, like ya do, ’cause, well, Nethack. I proceeded to have the following conversation with kisanthe:

annathepiper: I’m in the middle of Serious Nethack May Be Serious
annathepiper: Level 11 character currently in Sokoban
kisanthe: Ooh! Hope it’s the Bag of Holding Sokoban.
annathepiper: SHIT DEAD
annathepiper: Hallucinating and burdened and surrounded and then a damn incubus started taking my armor off!
annathepiper: Also, it was the amulet of reflection sokoban!
kisanthe: …okay, that’s not funny, but it is funny.
annathepiper: It was, really ;)
annathepiper: I was cheerfully sneaking through the final treasure room killing monsters one at a time and then a damn black light went off
annathepiper: And then suddenly HELLO EVERYBODY AWAKE!
kisanthe: You’d think a *black* light wouldn’t wake everybody up!
annathepiper: So I backed into a corner and started shooting everything in sight, until the incubus showed up!
kisanthe: So, assuming the black light affected the critters it woke up too… you died naked in a big murderous hallucinatory orgy?
annathepiper: Yeah pretty much XD
kisanthe: Best way to go! ;)

And now in my current game, I was hungry, so I whipped out a tin and discovered it contained pickled dwarf. There I am nomming it, and the next monster I see? A dwarf. And all I can think is AWK-WARD!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

It has amused me for a while now that in the vast repertoire of tunes available to Irish musicians, several of them have vaguely SF/F-nal names, like “King of the Fairies”, “Queen of the Fairies”, and “The Elven Cloak”.

That last one in particular, though, got me thinking of Nethack thanks to my propensity for playing Elf characters. Which, of course, led me to wonder about other hypothetical Nethack-themed Irish tune names! Such as:

• The Surly Shopkeeper
• Farewell to My Pet Cat
• Gold in the Bag of Holding
• The Cursed Loadstone Lament
• The Polymorph Trap Jig (this one would definitely change keys AND time signatures between the A part, the B part, and the C part)
• Yet Another Stupid Death Reel
• The Elven Boots
• The Infravision Jig
• Izchak’s Magic Lamp (That I Stole in Minetown)
• The Vibrating Square
• The Lich That Cursed My Broadsword
• Road to Gehennom
• Drowsy Maggie Needs Sleep Resistance
• A Luckstone to Banish Misfortune
• The Succubus Washerwoman

Anybody got any others?

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

So spazzkat‘s been watching a lot of Hetalia via Netflix streaming lately. I’d known about Hetalia already so I knew the concept behind the show, but I hadn’t ever seen any–so I hadn’t really realized a few fundamental truths of this particular anime.

One, most of the country characters are awfully hot.

Two, the closing theme song is devilishly, insidiously catchy. INSIDIOUSLY, I TELL YOU.

Three, what really got me giggling over this was seeing the character of Canada, who looks suspiciously like America, being COMPLETELY INVISIBLE. And making the other countries wig out whenever he was in the room, because they’d think the room was haunted. Also, Canada is adorable. So is the Kodiak bear he carries around.

Four, some of the country characters are, in fact, girls.

All of these things combined to get solarbird and me imagining what Cascadia’s character in this cast of shenanigans would be like. We decided Cascadia is a girl, that she has a ponytail and wears a windbreaker, that she is very, VERY good with computers, and that she’s physically active. She is also the only country who can in fact see Canada, and she has a massive crush on him, but thinks she’s bonkers because she sees that nobody else can see him! Problem is, Canada can’t see her.

The fanfic just WRITES ITSELF. Which it should. Because I don’t have time to write it!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

This is probably the most awesome thing I will see on the Net THIS ENTIRE WEEK: the cast of Invader Zim reading unproduced scripts at a convention! The episodes would have been called “Day of Da Spookies” and “Mopiness of Doom”, and the second one is particularly awesome with the judicious use of hand puppets. :D :D

Mad props to solarbird for finding this!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

I was saying something on the MurkMUSH about how I had 690 things on my To Read list, like I do, and to my amusement technoshaman said that I’d have to look out–or else my To Read list was going to eventually weigh more than I do. I told him I thought it probably already did, given that physical books are quite heavy!

Therefore, being geeks and interested in actually finding these things out, we determined that clearly, I’d have to work this through. Therefore I present for you the following amusing facts about my To Read list!

I have a total of 689 titles on the list, as demonstrated on my To Read list on Goodreads. (Note that you don’t have to have a Goodreads account to see user data there, so anybody can look at my list!)

Of these, here’s the count of books I actually own out of this list:

271 ebooks. For purposes of this exercise, I will take their contribution to the tally as the combined weights of my nook (roughly 12 ounces although let’s call it 13 because it’s in its case) and my iPhone (roughly 5 ounces, in its case). This makes for 18 ounces, or about 1.1 pounds.

12 hardcovers. Taking Robin McKinley’s Dragonhaven as a representative sample, Amazon lists its shipping weight as 1.2 pounds. Times 12, that’s 14.4 pounds.

114 mass market paperbacks. Taking seanan_mcguire‘s An Artificial Night as my sample, I get an Amazon shipping weight of 6.4 ounces. Working that out, it comes out to about 45.6 pounds.

65 trade paperbacks of various sizes. This time I shall use the anthology Fast Ships, Black Sails, with an Amazon shipping weight of 11.2 ounces. This works out to about 45.5 pounds.

This gives me a subtotal of 106.6 pounds.

But wait, the math is not yet done! The numbers I’ve quoted above are only for the books on my To Read list that I do in fact actually own. 227 titles are ones I do not actually possess yet. Here, though, we get into the realm of the theoretical. On one hand, we have the scenario of “I buy all of these remaining titles electronically”, in which case my tally above remains constant. However, if I apply a little thought to this based on my likely near-future book buying habits, I’m going to roughly estimate that 70 percent of these will be purchased electronically. To make the numbers easy, let’s say 160 of these will be ebooks.

This leaves me with 67 titles that I would hypothetically buy in print. Of these, I’d say that at most 5 of them would be hardcovers, 20 of them would be trades, and the remaining 42 would be mass market. Therefore to my previous tally, I should add another 6 pounds for hardcovers, 14 for the trades, and 16.8 for the mass market books. That gives me another rough estimate of 36.8 pounds for the books I don’t own yet!

Which makes my grand total (drum roll, if you please): 143.4.

I therefore still outweigh my To Read list! But only by roughly 20 pounds! Anybody want to place bets on whether it’ll surpass me by the end of the year? ;>

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Bwahahahaha! Spotted this over on Fandom Lounge on JournalFen: Ensign Sue Must Die! It’s a parody webcomic for the Trek Reboot!

And it is HY-LARIOUS. As the commenters on F_L observed, Trek fandom has really come full circle. :D

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Those of you on Twitter may have seen the #songprequel trending topic, wherein the idea was to post titles of songs that came before actual songs. Much hilarity ensued!

With a hat tip to technoshaman, spazzkat, solarbird, and fredpdx, here are the Great Big Sea ones we all came up with so far:

• Young Brown’s Mother
• Acting Third Lieutenant Taylor
• The Day Pat Murphy Got Sick
• Nagging Girlfriend
• Showing Up At the Kitchen Party With Mrs. White

Dara and Paul and I also came up with these:

• Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Bedtime” and “School is Just Starting”
• Simon and Garfunkel’s “Construction Crew Arriving at Bank of Troubled Water”
• Elvis Presley’s “(You Ain’t Nothin’ But a) OMG PUPPY” and “I’ll Do Anything to Get Into Some Blue Suede Shoes”
• Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the Colonies, I Was”
• The Day the Music Bought a Cheap Ticket on a Small Plane in Bad Weather
• Slightly Darker than Usual Day of the Heart
• Radio Killed the Vaudeville Star
• From O Brother, Where Art Thou?, “Boy of Periodic Sadness”
• Kenny Rogers’ “You Picked a Fine Time for Our First Date, Lucille”
• Duran Duran’s “Peckish Like the Wolf Cub”
• Kiss Him Hello (may be more obvious if you sing “na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, HELLO”)
• And last but definitely not least, from Dr. Horrible, “Misbehaving Pony Solo”

Got more? Drop ‘em in the comments!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.