So Nancy and I had some moneys to spend one ourselves. I'd been thinking of picking up a netbook, but instead, I got a Dell Ultrabook. The box it came in--not the small box the actual machine was in, but the shipping box is an inch wider and a couple inches longer than my current machine. It weighs three pounds!!

I haven't done much with it because Nancy needs to add it to our network before I can download the few things I need for it. It's a writing machine...no games, no mouse (I hate using a touch pad when I'm internetting and it makes it hard to play solitaire or mahjong) and nothing else that will get in my way. I hate it when I decide that going out will help me write and I have to haul this heavy machine around.

Other than that major excitement, I've been feeling out of sorts. Nancy had some kind of really persistent bronchitis thing that kept her out of work for a week. I fought the worst of it of so I didn't have any of the horrible coughing fits, but even now I'm still more tired than I should be.

I was going great guns on my Reversebang but then I took a couple days off during the worst of my cold and now I'm having a hell of a time getting started again. I've got plenty of time, but the sooner I finish this, the sooner I can start my Big Bang.

I'm hoping the excitement of a new machine will help.

So that's me.

crossposted from http://telesilla.dreamwidth.org/290216.html | comments | you can comment at my DW using OpenID

The first volume of Shadow Unit is now available as a proper paper book with a gorgeous Kyle Cassidy cover.

It will be available through Amazon within a week, and will slowly filter its way through the rest of the online distribution system.

This volume contains the first half of Season 1. Volume 2 should be available in about a month, with other volumes to follow.

And of course, Shadow Unit in its entirety is available for free online, and as a modestly priced ebook through the usual sources.

The story began in 2007, and will end in 2013. It's not too late to discover one of the coolest collaborative serials in the genre internets!

Online map calculates travel costs, times between cities in ancient Rome. (Actual site here.)

Two posts by my friend Matt Hall (his mother was Grayson Hall, who played Dr Julia Hoffman on the original Dark Shadows TV show; his father was Sam Hall, a writer for the show) on the Burton movie.

First, one of my favorite Beastie Boys tunes, and one of my all-time favorite videos:

I wasn’t blogging last week when MCA (a/k/a Adam Yauch) passed away, and I don’t think I would have said much about him had I been: The Beastie Boys were never a big influence for me, and despite being a teen in the early 90s, I wasn’t their target demographic. Something about how I didn’t think, at least at the time, that anyone needed to fight, as such, for their right to party. (That and I did, and still do, find a lot of their early stuff to be mired in easy misogyny, but let’s not speak (too) ill of the dead.)

That said, I realized that this would be a perfect time, albeit two years late, to propound on one of my favorite paradoxes involving The Beastie Boys. That being, if they’re around in the Star Trek universe, for young Kirk to be listening to in his step-dad’s car in the latest Trek movie, how can they refer to the fictional Mr. Spock in their song “Intergalactic”? I think the lyric specifically is “like a pinch on the neck from Mr. Spock.”

And the answer actually came to me pretty quickly, because in Star Trek IV, Spock is referred to by name in public and… knocks out some annoying punk, to applause, on a city bus with a pinch on the neck. And then it kind of writes itself. Spock and Kirk and company aren’t aware of it, but “Mr. Spock” becomes a sort of folk hero in San Francisco in the late 80s and 90s, big enough to come to the awareness of MCA, et al., and it’s just the kind of obscure, local, subculturish thing they’d include in one of their songs.

Dumb and unnecessary, but I thought I’d share anyway and let that little bit of geekery stand in for a proper tribute to Yauch.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Random quote of the day:

 

“He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.”

—William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell,” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

I'll be signing books at Mysterious Galaxy bookstore in San Diego on June 3 at 2 pm. See link for details:

http://www.mystgalaxy.com/event/lynn-flewelling-signs-sd-060312

Hope to see you there! If you can't make it, call the store and reserve your signed copy. They ship! Internationally, too.