Ordinary Day

Dara put up a few posts of her own detailing her POV of our adventures in Harrison Hot Springs, including a loverly picspam of various things we looked at. Including a couple of shots off of her camera of me and the boys of De Temps Antan!

I particularly like this one, of my reaction when I got called out for being a double agent for Le Vent du Nord, since I was wearing their T-shirt:

Go click over to Dara’s post to see the other one, of me and Éric Beaudry, current holder of the title of Anna’s Favorite Bouzouki Player from Quebec!

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.

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.

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.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter and/or Facebook will have seen this already, but I thought it was worth putting into a longer post: I have decided that, given the news that PAX has sold out completely this year, a “PAX” should clearly be the default measurement unit for any gathering of nerds.

I am given to understand that in recent years, PAX has had upwards of 30,000 attendees. It seems therefore reasonable to estimate a PAX at 30,000 nerds. Which gives us the following measurement units:

• 1 megaPAX = 30,000,000,000 nerds, or the approximate number of nerds required to buy your book before you can outsell J.K. Rowling
• 1 kiloPAX = 30,000,000 nerds, or the number of nerds buying tickets to the latest SF/F blockbuster
• 1 PAX = 30,000 nerds
• 1 deciPAX = 3,000 nerds, or the approximate annual attendance at Norwescon
• 1 centiPAX = 300 nerds, or the approximate number of attendees at any given showing of a Harry Potter movie
• 1 milliPAX = 30 nerds, or the approximate number of attendees at any given SF/F convention panel
• 1 microPAX = .03 nerds

Actual attendees of PAX should let me know if this year’s PAX surpasses the estimated number of a single PAX measurement. We wouldn’t want the math to be wrong, now would we?

Also, I am willing to entertain suitable counter-theories that a PAX could also be considered the unit of “amount of force of interest required to gather 30,000 nerds in a single location”. If you would like to support this theory, show your work in the comments!

And, props to kirbyk and alfvaen for unit suggestions and prefix corrections!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Bouzouki!

As in, "His luggage, however, did not arrive. Also not with him is his gate-checked bouzouki. I can set him up with spare pajamas and toothbrush and such, but I do not have a bouzouki here."

spazzkat opines that by the end of the week, Neil will have a dozen bouzoukis. If he doesn't, his fandom is slacking.

(Mr. Merritt, however, cannot have mine. Although I ouch for his instrument not keeping up with him, and I hope it catches up with him in short order. Along with the rest of his luggage! But especially the bouzouki.)