![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
dthon's Friends PageCreate a LiveJournal Account Learn more
|
You are viewing dthon's Friends Page Create a LiveJournal Account Learn more | Explore LJ: Life Entertainment Music Culture News & Politics Technology |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small}
officialgaiman)
blackaire)
I'm out of here for SDCC in the morning and I have to pack, so this one's short.
Got a new idea of how to start "Rusty Cage" last night, taking it to the con with me to try and finish in my spare time.
Got some awesome news about my adult series that I can't share yet, but will asap.
---
Bookkeeping:
15. Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island
I don't normally swear in relation to books, but this book? Mindfuck. Sublimely written, seamless, spooky mindfuck. I liked Lehane before now because he writes about my home town but now I think I'm a little in love with him.
| Originally published at Caitlin Kittredge. |
katatomic)
Just packing to run off to Comic Con in San Diego tomorrow. If any of you are in the SD area this weekend, I hope you'll be able to drop in and say hi. Even if you can't do the convention (they are sold out--I know), I'm going to be doing something at Borders in the Gaslamp district Saturday at 8 p.m.
Originally they said it was just a signing, but it seems that it's become a live installment of Babel Clash, so a whole bunch of us crazy writer types will be yammering up a storm, including Patrick Rothfuss, Rob Thurman, Thomas Sniegoski, Amber Benson, Seanan McGuire, Jeanne Stein, and me. I think there's going to be some coverage at the Borders SF/Babel Clash blog after/during the event so even if you can't come, you can check out the crazy.
Aside from that, I'm also on a panel about Crime: Usual and Unusual on Thursday, 12:30-1:30, then signing in the Autograph Area afterward. Friday is par-tay day with dinner with the Penguin publicists and a couple of the coolest writers afoot: Marjorie Liu, Seanan McGuire, and me (yes, I am cool, when you don't notice the pudge and the gray hair). Then off to party the night away, then signing, signing, signing on Saturday, first at the Penguin booth (#11-17) from 11 to noon and then the Babel Clash Live gig.
In between, I hope to hang out a bit with my sister and the fabulous Caitlin Kittredge, Jackie Kessler, Pat Rothfuss, Victor Gischler, and maybe I can finally meet some of my favorite comics writers (I hear Ed Brubaker will be there and so will Warren Ellis! W00t!)
I'll try to be a good little hermit and take photos, but... you know how bad I am about that...
cmpriest)
Here’s today’s progress on the alternate-history battlefield adventure about a widowed nurse from a Confederate hospital aboard a west-bound train pulled by a Union war engine — now with military intrigue, steampunk Texas rangers, undead political separatists, murderous plots, bushwhackers, bandits, sabotage, and epic scenes of mayhem:
Project: Dreadnought
New Words: 3099 (pretty good)
Present Total Word Count: 134,838 words
Goal: 140,000 words
Things Accomplished in Real Life: Spent the morning on day-job work; exchanged some important emails/phone calls; met Hans briefly; mailed a whole bunch of stuff; went to Walgreens.
Things Accomplished in Fiction: Holy shit. I’m writing the denouement. There is an excellent chance I will actually finish this book tomorrow or the next day. And I say that as someone who bloody well knows my tendencies toward saying this kind of thing and then failing repeatedly, writing for another week or two. But not this time. Seriously, I’m almost done. And I’m almost breathless about it.
Reason for Stopping: The oven just beeped. Time to pull the roast out and get slicing.
[Crossposted to/from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so either here or there.]jaylake)As noted here, calendula_witch, kenscholes and I have made a joint sale to Tor.com. Sale was the two stories written collaboratively by kenscholes and me back in March at San Francisco's Borderlands Books [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ], "The Starship Mechanic" and "Looking for Truth in a Wild Blue Yonder", plus an article about the event written by calendula_witch, all three items as a combined feature. Whee!
| Originally published at jlake.com. |
elfs)
One very rare problem that hits some people with Drupal is that it hangs on installation, and never gets anywhere. Using Firebug, I was able to track the problem down to jQuery, then ripped out the minimized copy of jQuery, stuck in a full copy, and re-ran the install, which immediately revealed the bug.
Drupal was attempting to access a URL that is not sandboxed (in the list of legal URLs for its own site) using Javascript. Javascript limits (”sandboxes”) URLs to prevent cross-site exploits, and in this case Drupal was attempting to access an IP-based URL on a different port.
There are two interrelated problems. First, access on the IP rather than the host name. Firefox can’t tell those are the same address and sandboxes them apart from one another. Attempting to access one from the other is a security violation. Second, access on a different port: that was caused by Nginx as a front-end to the Apache box. Drupal is relying on Apache’s “ServerName” setting, and it shouldn’t.
If you’re having this problem and you’re developing on the same box you’re browsing from, stop and then restart Apache. If you see this message: apache2: Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName, that’s your problem. Use the IP address rather than any locally assigned hostnames for the Drupal install.
Secondly, if you’re using Nginx or any other reverse proxy, go around it. Use the IP address of the Apache install directly, not the reverse proxy’s front end.
I hope this helps someone out there.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.comdr_pretentious)
This month my fellow DP authors and I are thinking about summer. My summer muse is the Adirondack landscape. You can find my guest post, Earth of Birch and Hemlock, at the blog of Isabelle Santiago.
Meanwhile, Imogen Howson is here in my electronic salon with a lovely evocation of a writer's summer in her native English countryside. You can also check out her blog, her tweets, and, above all, her books. If you're into fantasy YA with romance elements, she's the writer you're looking for.
Imogen says:
It’s July, and I’m in the midst of an English summer. English people do a lot of complaining about our weather, but I’ve been loving our summer so far. We’ve had some gloriously sunny days—I’ve been out in sleeveless tops, which as my daughters would tell you, is pretty miraculous. We’ve had rain, too, of course, but then, that’s what keeps our land green and pleasant, so I’m not complaining about that either.
We live out in the countryside, not far from Sherwood Forest, and every morning when I take my husband to the station I drive through a world of green. When it’s been raining (which, let’s be honest, is quite a lot), even the air seems green—as if the trees and grass aren’t colourfast and the rain draws their colour out, letting it seep into the air as if it’s blotting paper.
I work at home—as well as writing, I’m an administrative assistant at Samhain Publishing—and I love sitting with my coffee listening to the rain rattling on the conservatory roof.
Working at home gets a whole lot trickier when it’s a hot day, though. When I take my younger daughter to school through a blaze of sunlight and come back home to the sun-warm scent of the honeysuckle in the front garden…well, it’s not that easy to go into the cool kitchen and spend the day in front of the much less seductive glow of the computer screen.
I’ve tried taking the laptop out into the garden, or even just the conservatory, but of course if it’s a sunny day there’s no hope of seeing the screen. At least I don’t have to use the laptop for writing, but all the same, there’s something terribly soporific about the reflection of sunlight on white paper, the heat on the back of my neck, the buzzing of our huge fat bumblebees in the lavender. It’s very tempting to shut my eyes, telling myself I need to plan out the next scene, and end up sitting, mindless, soaking up the warmth.
What I need, I’ve decided, is a gazebo, something so I’m not in the direct sunlight, but I’m not stuck inside the house all day either. And a laptop screen that morphs seamlessly from standard backlit to e-ink. And non-glare paper. And if the bees could get just a little bigger they could probably pour my coffee and bring it out to me. Ideal working environment? I think so.
mdhenry)So this past weekend Team Seattle took to the road for an event in Salem at Escape Fiction. Decided to let the pictures tell the story this time…
For the rest of the set (WITH CAPTIONS!) Click the pic!
Originally published at Mark Henry. You can comment here or there.
swan_tower)I'm curious to know what folks here on the comm, members and watchers alike, think about writers putting out short fiction that ties into their novel series.
As you might expect, this question's on my mind because I've done it (and intend to go on doing it). Because my Onyx Court books are semi-standalone, skipping through English history a century at a time, there are big gaps in between novels, and those gaps are filled with all kinds of interesting historical bits I otherwise wouldn't get to touch. So far the only pieces I've written is Deeds of Men, which takes place between Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie, but I have plans for more. I also have unexecuted side-story notions for both my doppelganger books, and for things that aren't in print yet. So it's gotten me thinking about why we write (and read) these stories, and who they're written for.
You know what that means: poll time!
( Read more... )
I have some further thoughts on this, but I'll hold them until a future post; my training as a social scientist tells me not to skew the data. :-)
--Marie Brennan
cupcake_goth)::looks at To Do list, starts giggling nervously::
Yeah, I may not be around much. Writing, emails, and laundry own my time right now. So here, have some clicky-links!
Video of the Gothic Charm School picnic, from NY Post: http://www.nypost.com/video/?channe
Photos from the picnic, from Time Out New York: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/o
The Gothic Charm School Flickr group! (Please add photos if you have them!) http://www.flickr.com/groups/gothic_cha
And, because it wouldn't be a proper post of clicky-links from me without this sort of thing, the hat I'm currently coveting: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?li
wilwheaton)
Years from now, our kids are going to ask us about the Wolf Shirt and Keyboard Cat memes and wonder why in the world we cared about them so much. When that day comes, some of us will reach into our dressers, pull out this shirt, and tell our children, "We needed them, so we could have this."
dorktowerfeed)
If you can see this strip, congratulations. The site’s been overwhelmed with traffic, apparently, causing the problems of the last few months. New server move expected soon…VERY soon, I hope…
deannahoak)
I spent the fortieth anniversary of the moon landing sleeping underneath a Saturn V rocket at the Kennedy Space Center with my daughter, Blaine, and my friend Lucienne Diver and her family. As the center reenacted the landing for us and described to us how very nearly the astronauts missed it after their onboard computer malfunctioned and their equipment failed to guide them properly (they had to ignore the rocky landing site their computer suggested, fly off on their own, and landed with just 15 seconds of fuel to spare), I couldn’t help but marvel that we managed this feat with the technology of the 1960s. I’m not sure how much computing power those astronauts had available to them for the landing, but I’m willing to bet that I have more in my iPhone.
If you were told today that you could go to the moon but would have to use the same technology those first astronauts did, would you take the offer? I don’t think I would, and it gives me a newfound appreciation for those first adventurers.
Comments? -- Linkaeforge)
My latest Escapist piece is now up for your enjoyment, or lack thereof.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/article
masqlab)
The schedule of today's events required an early morning yoga workout. Me no like. I don't mind waking up early, or even getting up early and eating and showering and going to work, but man my body is in no mood to exercise. I'm good at yoga -- it's my favorite workout DVD -- but I was not stretchy or balanced at all at 6am. Ugh. But now I'm done, I'm at work and eating breakfast. I met a former co-worker that I've known since I moved to Seattle at the Starbucks this morning and we had a nice time waiting in line catching up. I didn't realize she worked so close by.
Tomorrow is my day off from exercise and I think we'll spend the evening scrubbing the deck. Woohoo.
freeport_pirate)A couple of years ago Nicole and I took Kate to see a documentary called Girls Rock. It's about the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls, which started in Portland in 2001. Kate loved it and was totally inspired. She wanted to go but didn't have much experience with music at the time. Through the video game Rock Band, however, we discovered that she had a talent for drumming. Nicole took her down to the Seattle Drum School in Georgetown and signed her up for some lessons. Last year she did a day camp there but it was mostly boys and there were less than ten kids. She did really well and her teachers down there started tossing around the phrase "drum prodigy."
So last month Nicole and Kate spent a week in Portland so Kate could go to Rock 'n' Camp for Girls. She had a great time. During the camp the girls form into bands, and each band writes and rehearses a song. They also take workshops on screen printing, zine making, self-defense and other useful arts. The week culminates with a big show, held this year the Bagdad Theater.
I worked during the week but on Friday night Ray and I drove down to Portland so we could see the show Saturday. Kate was nervous because she was going to be playing in front of 700 people. And indeed it was quite a scene. There were sixteen girls bands to play and another that was made up of older camp volunteers. The bands had great names like the Bionic Poodles and the Thunder Bats. Kate's band, Employees Only, was the last of the girls bands to play, and the other bands took over two hours to do their songs. Some of them were fun and energetic, others sort of fell apart onstage, but all of them had spirit and it was pretty awesome to see them rocking out at such a young age. My favorite of them was Vent, who did a song called, "It Came from the Vent."
Finally Employees Only hit the stage. It then became clear why they had the last slot. They were tighter than many of the other bands and the song was catchy and speedy. Kate fuckin' rocked the drums. She was really awesome and we were ridiculously proud of her. I remember thinking that Kate was clearly the best drummer of the girls bands, and then realizing this was a totally dad thing to assert. I stand behind it though; Kate has mad skills for a 13 year old.
After the show we took Kate out for a celebratory sushi dinner. She was jazzed by the whole experience and wants to go back with her friend Gloria next year. Big thumbs up to the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls. They are doing something truly cool there and tomorrow's music scene will be better for it.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
Better day today. I didn't find my bus pass; the search continues tonight. I did get my bills in the mail. I got a lot of work done today (reviewed an insane number of data strings on the game for terminology that has to be shortened/clarified/de-Engrished, etc.), and I got some medicine to lessen the itching resulting from being eaten alive this weekend. Its effect is temporary but it's a damn sight better than scratching my arms raw.
I seem to have let a lot of things get away from me. I didn't finish the bills though I took care of many of them. I haven't washed the dishes lately. I've been eating like a 7-year-old (i.e., bad stuff almost all the time). I haven't been brushing Spanky, who needs it badly. Haven't seen "Half-Blood Prince" yet (though I'm told it's okay to wait). And I'm hugely behind on jewelry, painting, and writing projects. I seem to have forgotten how to manage my time with a full-time job, which is a problem in a very real, practical sense. And though I regret it, this job won't last much longer.
I need to start laying groundwork for the next job, whatever it may be. The only problem is that I'm not quite sure when this job will end and I don't want to leave the team high and dry if I get a job and we're not done with the project.
I'm trying to be sensible with money and not spend too outrageously. Not going to the ANA Convention in LA this year feels on the one hand like I'm being virtuous and on the other like I'm being totally deprived. Well, deprivation is a matter of perspective. But it won't be so geographically close again for quite a while and I enjoyed it so much last year. ::sigh:: Well, this is me, being an adult.
I should go get something done. I have the better part of the evening left to me (worked late tonight) and I don't want it to go to waste.