Tag: Suckage

Things that totally suck

Marking Time

Bad News

The story of the film so far:

Apartment is still closed, some standing water, interior is humid like New Orleans on a midsummer day after a rainstorm, but cold like Chicago is… now, come to think of it.  No water, of course, but occasional electricity(!!)

The hotel’s wifi is still down (WTF?), but I can make a temporary hotspot with my phone and communicate with the outside world that way, except that the download time is measured in units like the old dial-up/modem connections (remember them?) so I’m not going to be anywhere like as much as I normally am.

– Good news is that I don’t think the insurance company is going to try and screw us, but time will tell on that one.  So far they have been nothing but understanding — especially when I told Insurance Agent Man that a.) the guns weren’t damaged and b.) we’d managed to keep the Persian rugs away from the water.  The sigh of relief was quite audible.

– Bad news is that because New Wife is an hourly worker, she’s not going to get paid for this past week because her school was closed, so… you know all those generous contributions y’all have been making?  Noses above water, especially as next week is Car(s) Payment Time — and once again, our sincerest thanks for your generosity.

I’ll try to post more, but please bear with me.  Aaaaargh.  In the meantime, here’s something to put a smile on your face:

I found those (all packed with loose ammo) when I was cleaning out the gun stuff.  Left to right:  .45 ACP, .357 Mag and .223 Rem.

Except of course I don’t own any guns which shoot .357 Mag or .223 Rem.  Go figure.

Update:  For all those interested in the “spare ammo”, I’m sorry.  As soon as I found it, I found it a good home because I didn’t want to hassle with it, and posted about it much later.

Dry

Bad News

Just a quick update: we’re safely ensconced at a long-stay hotel, but we’re still subject to occasional blackouts which play havoc with the wifi server. So postings will only be occasional.

We are fine.

That said, we are still waiting for the insurance company to come and view the damage, so in that regard there’s still some uncertainty.

To all those folks who have tossed dollars into Ye Olde Begginge Bole, our deepest and sincerest thanks.

Apart from the insurance uncertainty (and you all know what I mean), I feel fine about things. We’re safe, warm and DRY, so things can only get better*.

*cue Howard Jones’ song of the same name.

Glueball Wormening

Weather

This week in Plano:

…but normal service resumes later next week:

I was going to take New Wife on a little car trip over the weekend up into the Ozarks as she has Monday off, but I don’t live in Chicago anymore so my blood has thinned.  Yeah, I’m a big pussy.

We’ll stay indoors, wrap up / stay in bed, hope that the ice storms don’t cause any power outages, and trust that I don’t end up looking this:

 

RFI: Brave Problems

Technology

I know a couple of you folks use the Brave browser, and I need a little assistance.

When I create a bookmark for a page, it doesn’t appear anywhere:  not in the folder I select, nor, it appears, anywhere else.  This happens regardless of whether I use the little Bookmark shortcut on the left of the URL, or hit CTRL+D.

Brave’s homepage doesn’t seem to have any actual help functions — only FAQs and a forum to which I can’t submit a query, or start a thread.  Highly irritating.

Any advice or assistance will be appreciated.

 

Test

Writing

I think I may have figured out what was happening with WordPoop (think “automatic update” and you won’t be far from the truth).  To test this, please respond in comments if the entire passage below gets posted (it ends, “So Jules licks the symbol at the end of the first chapter…” )

Julia (“Jules”) Wakefield is a twenty-five year old secretary who works at a British government agency, in a department so boring and inconsequential that everybody who’s ever worked there leaves it off their resume.

That’s during the day. At night, however, she is a fantasy maven: a mistress of a popular Internet website which explores and plays in the world of fantasy, and she is constantly looking out for The Next Big Fantasy Thing for her many hundreds of online fans and followers.

So when she discovers that her little neighborhood bookstore has found an obscure fantasy series from the 1930s, she buys the books; but when she reads them, she’s puzzled. The writing isn’t much good, the characters nothing unusual for the fantasy world, and the scenarios, while filled with erotic adventure, are quite bland, even though they do feature the standard fare of goblins, trolls, fairies and elves.

She posts her opinion online, and is mortified at the response from her readers in the comments section: “Missed the point,” “How could you be unmoved by the experience?” and the most cutting, “I thought you were smarter than this” are but a few of the remarks. She’s about to close the comments, when the very last one appears: “Did you not lick the symbol?”

Jules has no idea what this means, so she emails the commenter for an explanation, and in the response, she discovers the secret of the books’ popularity.

At the end of each chapter there appears a large, strange symbol (a different one for each book). Her reader tells her that if Julie licks the symbol, she will instantly be transported into the book and story itself, and will appear as a participant in the story at the beginning of the chapter, as the storyteller. (All the books are written in the first person.) When the chapter ends, the reader explains, she will be returned to reality, none the worse for wear, with absolutely no time having elapsed since she licked the symbol, and the chapter will have been magically rewritten with herself as the new storyteller, and the symbol will have disappeared.

The only problem is that while in the story, if she changes any part of the storyline in any way, even by misquoting the dialogue, the entire story will change from that point on, and she will not be able to control what happens. Only the occurrence of the last sentence in the original chapter can bring her back to reality—e.g. “At that moment, the door to the room opened, and a strange figure entered the room.”

The kicker is that if the last sentence cannot occur—say, if the door has already been destroyed by a phantom attacker—then she will no longer be able to return to reality, and will be trapped inside the story until the end of the next chapter. Worse still, if she happens to be killed in the story, she will instantly be transported back to reality, and could suffer a fatal heart attack, or not.

So Jules licks the symbol at the end of the first chapter…

And yes, it’s the premise for a series of novels I had planned to write several years ago, but lost interest therein because “fantasy”.

Update:  Okay, I think I’ve figured it out.  Normal service will resume tomorrow.