« February 2006 | Main | April 2006 »
March 31, 2006
Book #19: The Dragon Waiting
The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford
I had the pleasure of walking into this book knowing very little about it. I know John M. "Mike" Ford mainly from his comments and occasional posts on Making Light, and this book was recommended somewhere or another (probably there). I managed to forget whatever was on the back cover and just dive in. And I had such a great time discovering the book on its own terms that I'm rather hesitant to tell you anything more.
I'll say this: it's a history, and a fantasy (but despite the title, not an elves-and-dwarves-and-dragons fantasy). It's got quite a bit of the complicated genealogy of Richard Plantagenet (later Richard III) that, quite frankly, often went over my head. And half of everyone seems to be named Richard or Edward. But it's also got some of the most vivid and gripping characters I've ever read.
Posted by Fuzzy at 5:15 PM | Comments (0)
I am old, old, old
I was having a bit of trouble with the aforementioned final boss of Daxter and so, as one does, I went online to see if other people had already solved the problem. The game is new enough that there wasn't a complete guide at GameFaqs yet, but I found an answer to my problem on the Sony PlayStation Forums. And I'm going to reproduce that answer in full, below. But before you get there, fairness does compel me to point out that this person did solve the video game problem that I was unable to. But, and still, reading this I feel old, old, old. "Vales," by the way, are valves.
Re: Help with final boss...
with the last boss the first part where u have to jump from platform to platform is the hardest part to me. and when it starts wait until he shotes his first ever blast in the battle and when his hands glow hover to the other platform, he will start to shot blu thing that explode after time but if u get in ther radious blast when they first land u will get hurt. after awile he will go over these thing that it lookes like hes suking up energy and u go over to him and hit him with eather of your shoters. when u get him half dead the plat forms will fall and u will go down to to hover over dark eco and he will shot the blue boms and u will have to hover over to vales that u shot fire on and they will turn and u will then have the platformes back and do it until he goes to a smaller room and then deal with his last part when he shotes the blue thing he'll relaxe cuz hes tired then shot him and he will go over this are and then jump over to him and do this three times and he will be dead. tell u somthing and the game is done and u now can venture around the city and replay levels. once u get him to go to a new area u will not have to do the recently finished things. as in when u finish the jumping from platform to platform u will not have to do it again and when u get him to go to the next area it does the same.
Kids these days, etc., etc.
Posted by Fuzzy at 1:55 PM | Comments (2)
March 29, 2006
Glurp
I have another "Where's Mustapha?" picture, but I can't post it because the flash highlighted every piece of debris on the front hallway floor and so details exactly what kind of a disaster zone we're living in right now. I'll tell you that, but I won't show it to you.
I was going to use all my non-canoodling time while Erica's in Mississippi to clean the house all to pieces. Instead, I got sick as a dog. Oh woe is me, and no lovely fiancée to nurse me back to health. And worse and worse, last night I took NyQuil (or WalQuil or some equally vile green-flavoured mess) and it kept me up! Oh well, at least I used the time (un)productively to fiddle around with a blog template issue that had been bugging me.
(To wit: it used to be that when you got to the bottom of the main page of the other blogs I host, you were met with just the blank bottom of the page, with no indication whether there were earlier posts. Now there's a list of the 6 most recent posts. Check out the bottom of Erica and Fuzzy to see what I mean.)
Where was I? Sick? Awake? Loooonely? Yes, yes, and yes.
Well, that and I got to the Final Boss of Daxter.
Oh, and let me complain about that for a second. In this video game I'm playing, all the levels are named (Construction Site, Lumber Mill, Hive Queen, etc.) and you can see the name if you pause the game. The final boss level is named "Final Boss". And I hate when video games do that, and they do it a lot. A "boss," if you're not familiar, is a more-powerful-than-ordinary enemy at the end of a level, and are a pretty-standard feature in level-based video games. But "boss" is the technical term. This enemy at the end of the game isn't anybody's manager. Using the technical right where I, the player, can see it is anti-immersive. In movies, for example, you don't have a voice-over that says "let's do a tracking pan over to see how the protagonist is doing".* Video game manuals and on-screen help do it all the time.
* I'm sure there's some exceptions to this, but you know what I mean.
Posted by Fuzzy at 5:32 PM | Comments (0)
March 27, 2006
Moose and moose
And speaking of inflatable... last week at the MCA Gift Shop I was admiring the inflatable mounted moose heads and told Erica I wanted one for my birthday. When I came home from New York and walked into the bedroom to unpack my suitcase I sensed something looming over me. Ack! An inflatable moose head! My sweetheart is too, too nice to me.
The icing on the cake was a lil' stuffed moose that Erica snagged from a conference promo pack at work. Go Canada.
(P.S. We keep calling it a moose head, when it is clearly an inflatable deer head. I think 'moose' is just funner to say. Moose. Moose. Moose.)
Posted by Fuzzy at 5:19 PM | Comments (1)
Back in Chicago
Wednesday night I was halfway down the block from my hotel and I realized that I had ventured out into the New York night without a camera -- and ten steps later I saw a man covered, head to toe, in blinking lights. That city takes no time slapping you in the face with your deficiencies.
That night was a failure in terms of getting to a stand-up show, but a success in wandering around the city. (I have a $8 MTA card left over from wandering -- free to the first NY-based FuzzyCo reader to say "gimme".)
Thursday night I got over to the PIT to see Threat and Neutrino. This month is Threat's ninth anniversary of performing together. Neutrino was doing their first stage performance together (as opposed to the Neutrino Video Projects) in three years. Shaun and I have been performing together, off and on and in different groups, since 1992. Bare is 6 or 8 years old, depending on whether you count Bare Essentials Theater from Denver. (I don't have a point here, just rambling about numbers.)
After the show I hung out over at the Triple Crown with some of the Neutrino folks. I like those cats. Rebekka and I talked weddings. Square dance band!
I had been making fun of my co-worker Kyle because every time he comes to New York he eats the same exact thing: he stops at the Hard Rock Cafe on the way back to his hotel and gets a Nacho Supreme (or whatever they call it at the HRC -- a "Nacho Sonny Bono" or whathaveyou). I realized that every time I come to New York I eat at the same 4 places: bagel with lox at Smiler's or Ess-a-bagel for breakfast, Men Kui Tei for lunch, get out of work late, run straight to a show at the PIT, grab dinner afterwards at the Triple Crown. To make myself not feel quite so lame I had something different at both Men Kui Tei and the Crown this time. Tonkotsu Ramen = yum.
Also got to have a drink with Alex and Alyssa and watch the end of the Texas/West Virgina game, which Texas won in the last 0.8 seconds. I'm happy to report that I yelled out "Woo - Texas!" in a New York bar.
I think of Chicago as a public art friendly town, but hoodly-doodly there's a lot of art in New York. Especially in the lobbies of big buildings in Manhattan. I was making my slightly-tipsy way back to my hotel Thursday night, talking to Erica on the phone, and I had to stop and exclaim, "Inflatable Incredible Hulks!" Unsurprisingly, Erica said, "What?" "Inflatable Incredible Hulks! This lobby is full of inflatable Incredible Hulks. And a few monkeys. But mostly inflatable Incredible Hulks. I think it's art."
Posted by Fuzzy at 1:54 PM | Comments (1)
March 24, 2006
Geek with Family
My friend Kyle has starting blogging. You may remember Kyle from such stories as "Kyle made a t-shirt" and "Kyle tells you TV".
Posted by Fuzzy at 1:44 PM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2006
Not Book 18 and Book 18
It was bound to happen sooner or later with some book: I got 170 pages into Rats and Gargoyles and just... stopped... reading it. I carried it around for a few days without making any progress and then I switched bags and it didn't make the trip and then I realized it had been a week, at least, since I'd read any more in R&G. This will not do -- we have a goal, we have schedules to meet, people. People I respect recommended this book, so I think I'll assume that Mary Gentle's style is too subtle for me. (But absent that context, I'd just call it vague -- I'd find myself re-reading whole pages trying to figure out what, exactly, was happening.) It's always a hard decision for me to just abandon a book, but the harder thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing.
So, to get back on the horse, so to speak, I grabbed a mystery that I'd found on the free table at work sometime back, Symptoms of Death, by Paula Paul, and knocked it out in two train rides. Hmp -- pretty standard Victorian-England-set mystery fluff. I'm going to go throw it back on the free table.
Posted by Fuzzy at 3:59 PM | Comments (0)
March 20, 2006
Threadless
Threadless is having one of their periodic $10 sales, so if you want to look more like me for cheaper, go get some.
(Full disclosure: if you buy something from Threadless by clicking on that link there, I get a kick-back. So that I can buy more Threadless shirts. The madness never ends!)
Posted by Fuzzy at 3:13 PM | Comments (4)
March 17, 2006
Nicknames
My family are pretty much the only people who still call me by my birth name, so when my sister got the save the date card in the mail yesterday and it said "Erica and Fuzzy are getting married" she had to explain to my niece and nephew what a nickname was. Jake decided he wanted his nickname to be "Sam" and Amelia wants to be "Mia".
Posted by Fuzzy at 5:27 PM | Comments (1)
March 16, 2006
Animal Crossing
Erica and I have a little Animal Crossing: Wild World town called Cutiburg and our friend code is 3479-5957-5475 if you want to visit us over wifi. If that makes no sense to you, then please pretend I said nothing and we can continue to pretend I'm an adult.
Posted by Fuzzy at 9:11 PM | Comments (0)
March 15, 2006
Fuzzy as a Simpson
It's been a long time since I've done one of these sorts of things:
Courtesy of the Simpsomaker.
(via TheProtagonist5)
Posted by Fuzzy at 5:31 PM | Comments (0)
Where's Mustapha?
I assembled this little shelving unit*, put it in place, and Mustapha instantly shelved himself. If only all my things put themselves away like that.
And hey, Noah, that mug is on the bottom shelf because it is getting over to your house sometime.
* The problem with our great cedar-chest find was that we simply could not resist putting junk on top of it as soon as we walked in the door, which meant that the next morning we couldn't get hats or gloves out of it until we threw everything on the couch, which meant that the next night we had to clear off the couch to watch TV... by setting the stuff on top of the cedar chest.
Posted by Fuzzy at 12:09 PM | Comments (3)
March 14, 2006
Book 17: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
I've been having terrible luck keeping up with the book group that I'm theoretically a part of of (I haven't been to a monthly meeting in, oh, six months?) so I thought I'd read the new One Book, One Chicago book and get in sync with a few thousand of my fellow Chicagoans.
The book is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander* Solzhenitsyn. It is, as the title suggests, exactly one day in the life of a prisoner in a labor camp in the Soviet Union under Stalin. It's fiction, but based on Solzhenitsyn's real experiences in such camps.
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov spends most of his day trying to stay warm, thinking about food, and actually trying to get some work done (a work-gang system in the camp encourages production).
My god, this book has depressed me. I mean, it was bad enough that at the end of yet another horribly dehumanizing day, Shukhov remarks that the day was, you know, a pretty good day. I suppose there's something there about the indomitability of the human spirit or something. But what really depresses me is that I realized halfway through the book was that I was tensed up, bracing myself for the atrocities, and that they weren't coming. I'm not saying nothing bad happens in the book, I'm saying that by modern standards nothing incredibly, horribly bad happens in the book. And the fact that the god-damn gulag isn't as bad as what I know humans can do to humans is weighing heavy on my mind these days.
If you've read the book, the Chicago Public Library is hosting a forum to discuss it.
* Or Aleksandr or Alexandr. Crazy Cyrillic transliterations.
Posted by Fuzzy at 5:34 PM | Comments (0)
March 12, 2006
Please Back-up
Allow me for a moment to speak to a very select audience (except, really, you'll see that I'm speaking to all of you -- I'm being sneaky). I'm a computer support professional and I have a lot of friends, and to some of those friends I'm their computer support friend.
ring, ring
Me: Hey [redacted] - haven't heard from you in a while. What's up?
[redacted]: Well, I'm having this computer problem, and I think I'm screwed ...
If you're one of those folks - awesome. I'm happy to help. But let's work together to make sure that the next time you call me, it's without a audible note of panic in your voice: please, back-up your important computer files.
If you're a writer, pick up one of those USB key drives. You can get a 512 MB one for, like $30, and you can fit hundreds of Word docs on it -- make it part of your "whee, I finished a draft" ritual to put a copy on the little drive. If you're a graphic artist, CD-Rs are seriously $0.20 a piece -- go crazy! I'd even be happy to help you work out a back-up strategy that works for you and your budget. So then you can sound like this when you call me:
[redacted] (cheerfully): Hey Fuzzy, I know we haven't spoken in 6 months, but my computer seems to be a pile of smoking plastic, and I'd like to talk to you about how to set up a shiny new computer and restore all of my carefully backed-up files onto it. Whee!
Please? Thanks.
Posted by Fuzzy at 10:34 PM | Comments (1)
Tribute to Basketball
This is Tribute to Basketball. If you're a Don't Spit the Water fan, then you've seen it before, but a) Steev posted it on You Tube and is trying to pump up its stats over there and b) Erica did choreograph it.
Posted by Fuzzy at 8:54 AM | Comments (1)
March 10, 2006
Spring Break Hellscape
Tetter Sperber is in South Beach for a month and has a photoblog titled Spring Break Hellscape. It is teh awesome.
(via tinyluckygenius)
Posted by Fuzzy at 2:25 PM | Comments (0)
Dance Party
Last weekend we ended up a dance party at the Neo-Futurarium. Erica had hurt her foot doing her dance in Dido so she sat down mostly and took a bunch of blur-tastic photos.
I also made a lil' video using my lil' camera before Erica's feet were too hurt. No sound, so you'll have to 'thump-thump-thump' in your head while you watch it.
Posted by Fuzzy at 12:40 PM | Comments (2)
March 9, 2006
Clowns
Well, we're not really clowns. But we play them in one sketch. I just finished my 500 Clown workshop and, damn, that's some clowning.
Sean is Comic #1, which means, among other things, that he gets to dress up as a flight attendant. I'm Comic #2, which means that I get to sit backstage alot and watch Tomas practice magic tricks. I'm going to be in the show for the next few weeks (this week for sure, exact dates TDB) so come out to Lavender Cabaret's Femme TV to see me in a red nose. Among other things.
Posted by Fuzzy at 6:38 PM | Comments (1)
Snacks
The terrible part is that there's a entire grocery store in the first floor of my office building, so with just a short ride, I can buy healthy food, cheaply. But I still spend an inordinate amount of money getting crap from the vending machines in the breakroom. They recently 'upgraded' the vending machines (and raised the prices in the process) and here's two observations.
There's no more slot A-1! Two whole machines are controlled from one money-ingester and keypad and it's all numbers. I am not a number!
Golden Eye! No, not that GoldenEye. It's an infrared sensor that promises to detect whether or not something falls to the bottom of the machine. So if your snack gets stuck or you accidentally choose the row with the empty spot in front or whatever it'll refund your money. Viva la future!
Posted by Fuzzy at 6:20 PM | Comments (0)
March 7, 2006
Columbia Chronicle article on March First
The Columbia Chronicle has an article on the March First army men project - ‘Men’ of war: Plastic army men blur line between protest, public art.
Posted by Fuzzy at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)
March 6, 2006
Four Things About Chicago
This is a little odd, since I just did the making-the-regular-rounds one of these, but I saw that Sean had morphed it for LA, so I wanted to do the same for my little town.
4 Things About Chicago
Four Jobs I've Had In My Life in Chicago:
Consultant
Event Photographer
Network Analyst and Graphics Technology Specialist
Video Editing Assistant
Four Movies About Chicago I Could Watch Over And Over:
Adventures in Babysitting
Blues Brothers
Bound
Ferris Beuller's Day Off
Four Places I've Lived All Over Chicago:
Kenmore and Winona (Uptown)
Damen and Cornelia (Roscoe Village)
Winthrop and Ardmore (Edgewater)
Winthrop and Ardmore (Edgewater) (yes, this is a different place)
Four Chicago-Themed Shows I Love(d) To Watch:
Cupid (it had promise)
ER (the first two seasons I was addicted)
Good Times
Talkin' Funny
Four Places I Would Vacation At In Chicago:
The Art Institute
In a hotel, downtown
The lakefront
Wisconsin
Four Chicago-Based Websites I Visit Daily:
Chicago Metblog
Chicagoist
Gapers Block
tinyluckygenius
Four Of My Favorite Foods Found In Chicago:
late night pork tacos (Burrito Mexicana)
rib eye sandwich (Harrigan's)
sausages (Hot Doug's)
scrambled eggs, pork chop, grits, raisin toast - buttered (Little Corner Restaurant)
Four Places In Chicago I Would Rather Be Right Now:
at home, on the couch, with my baby
on stage at the Playground
sitting in Metropolis, reading
Four Chicago Bloggers Tagged:
Adam Witt
Bilal Dardai [done]
Don Hall [done]
Lauren Liss [done]
Posted by Fuzzy at 5:37 PM | Comments (1)
Four Things
Out of all of these things of things I've done (once I stopped protesting that I never do them) I've actually been tagged, by Chuck, to do one. And then I had an idea, but first to respond to Chuck's emailed threats against non-compliance...
Four jobs I’ve had
Actor
Bookkeeper at a Vintage Clothing Store/Skate Shop/Piercing Salon/Head Shop
Handyman
Network Analyst and Graphics Technology Specialist
Four movies I can watch over and over
Ferris Beuller's Day Off
Joe vs. The Volcano
The Killer
Seven Samurai
Four TV shows I love to watch
The Daily Show
My Name is Earl
The Office
Project Runway
Four places I’ve been on vacation
New Zealand
Mt. St. Helens
Northern Territory, Australia
Edinburgh, Scotland
Four favorite dishes
crab, steamed, with Old Bay Seasoning
chorizo and eggs migas
scrambled eggs, pork chop, grits, raisin toast - buttered
turkey pot pie
Four websites I visit daily
Andy Ihnatko's YellowText
Boing Boing
Medium Large
Slacktivist
Four places I’d rather be
at home, on the couch
on a stage
at a coffee shop, reading
dancing, anywhere
Four bloggers I’m tagging
Christopher Reid [done]
Erica Reid [done]
Katie Reid [done]
Shaun Himmerick (pick a domain name, already)
Posted by Fuzzy at 5:17 PM | Comments (1)
George Eckart Interview
My friend George Eckart was interviewed by Chicagoist about his short animated films.
Posted by Fuzzy at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)
March 3, 2006
Books #15 & 16
So when I was at the library, the other book I was trying to find was The Hidden Family, which is the second half of the story started in The Family Trade. The library's online catalog said that they had two copies and that neither was checked out, but they weren't on the shelf, and I guess that means they were in shelving cart limbo. But where The Hidden Family should have been, there was Iron Sunrise, also by Charlie Stross. So I grabbed it.
Iron Sunrise is a sequel to Singularity Sky, which I'd read a few years ago. But it's a "set in the same world with some of the same characters" sequel, not a "book chopped in half" sequel*, so it was pretty easy to pick up and get up to speed on the background. Back from the first book is Rachel Mansour, a UN weapons inspector, but in a post-Singularity world where the UN is a freelance peace-keeping corporation and the weapons of mass destruction are capable of destroying suns. In fact, the book is something of a murder mystery, only the victim was an entire world. One of the survivors of that world's destruction is Wednesday, a goth teenager who has been secretly trained since childhood to be an agent of the "weakly godlike" AI entitywho lurks behind the scenes of the books, and who (Wednesday, not the Eschaton) is the other protaganist of Iron Sunrise. "Action-packed" would be a good hypenated word to describe the book. "Good" would be a good single word.
Slan by A. E. van Vogt is a science fiction classic that I had never read, and it had just come up in a blog post somewhere (that I can't remember where), and I happened to see it at the library. Far in the future, a mutated off-shoot of humanity lives under extreme persecution. These "slans" have enormous strength, incredible intelligence, and, using "tendrils" on the tops of their heads, can read minds. A young slan, Jommy Cross, is orphaned at age nine and struggles against the massed armies of the Earth.
I understand that it's a book that was very important to a lot of people because of its theme of persistence against persecution. In the 1950s sci-fi fan culture there was a saying "fans are slans". And an Amazon reviewer says:
I first read Slan in my early teens, and (this is going to get a little personal here, folks) I really identified with the struggle against persecution because at the time I was an adolescent struggling with my own sexuality and the realization that I am gay - something that in my youth (and to a *slightly* lesser extent today) was something to hide, something to fear, lest you suffer persecution.
I re-read the book along with a few other Van Vogt novels as an adult, and it still gave me that feeling of empowerment - that being different was not necessarily "bad."
So, yay, and it's an important part of sci-fi history, but it was really hard for me to read as anything but a historical document. The science-fiction-guesses-that-turned-out-to-be-wrong I don't mind so much. At some level all science fiction is just make-em-ups, fantasy with robots instead of goblins**. And the lack of actual plot or the resolution thereof, I can live with(out). But it's the dialogue. It manages to be melodramtic and stiff at the exact same time. Drove. Me. Crazy.
An overview of A.E. van Vogt's career
A collection of Slan covers
* Sorry I keep harping on this, but the whole concept continues to cheese me off. Especially since I still don't know what happens in The Hidden Family.
** Oh, don't start flaming me for this -- I can argue the other way myself, far into the night.
Posted by Fuzzy at 4:23 PM | Comments (1)
IT Crowd Photo Quiz
Since we're on the topic, Yoz Grahame, who was one of the technical consultants for The IT Crowd, has up a simple* photo quiz about the set of the show.
* Simple for those of you who start sentences with "back in my day we only had 64K of memory, uphill both ways..."
Posted by Fuzzy at 12:02 PM | Comments (0)
Congratz Christopher
Smarty pants, indeed.
Posted by Fuzzy at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)
March 2, 2006
Are You From the Past?
Roy: Yeah, you do know how a button works, don't you? No, not on clothes. No, there you go, I just heard it come on. No, that's the music you hear when it comes on. No, that's the music you hear when... I'm sorry, are you from the past?
The favorite new sitcom around the office is The IT Crowd, a British sitcom from the creators of Father Ted about a small IT department. (Hey Fuzzy, you don't live in Britain, how are you watching this show? Oh, there are ways.)
Hi-larious stuff, even if you're not a super geek. (Though, don't worry if you are a super geek -- real geeks were involved.)
And now my friend Kyle has made a T-shirt inspired by one of his favorite lines from the show. Available in geek-friendly black as well.
Update: BoingBoing linked to the shirts and Cory Doctorow called them "amazing fan-tees".
Posted by Fuzzy at 12:08 PM | Comments (4)
March 1, 2006
March First
Just so you know, if you want to get me to help you with your thing, all you have to do is say "it's an art project." Boom, I'm there. So it was that at 9 pm tonight I was out with 70 other people putting little green army men every 3 feet along Lincoln Avenue. For 5 miles, from Lincoln and Clark to Lincoln and Western.
Peace activist Sallie Gratch had brought the Mouths Wide Open Army Men Project to Chicago, as covered in a recent Reader article (PDF link), placing green plastic army men in random locations around Chicago. She inspired the organizers of the "March First" art/activism project to take that a step farther by placing 4300 army men "marching" down Lincoln Avenue. Each army man has a sticker (or should have -- the prone guys lost their sticker pretty easily) that says "Bring Me Home" and the Mouths Wide Open website.
The whole project had taken just three weeks from conception to execution, and the mood of those gathered at the Lincoln Tap Room afterwards was pretty chill. With a minimum of effort each (I covered just 2 blocks) we had accomplished a pretty big project. Would anyone understand / think about / be affected by the message of the project? Who knows. But together we had all done a thing.
Update: a set of photos, a blog post from Rachel Mason, Miss Single USA discusses getting involved.
Posted by Fuzzy at 2:43 PM | Comments (0)