Discolor Online

I'll be leaving shortly for another mega-drive down to Portland to pick Kate up from my mom's. If I miss the worst of the holiday traffic, I'll be on the road for 7 hours or so today. Bleh.

My route is fairly boring, but at a certain point I must pass the Uncle Sam billboard, where some crackpot farmer has been posting little vitriolic slogans with a decidedly conservative bent for decades now.

The most recent of these visible from the southbound lanes was "Did Jessica Lynch receive kind treatment or an apology?"

That there is a person alive who can equate the treatment of Jessica Lynch to America's treatment of prisoners in this Iraq war just sickens me. Nothing like having a few hours alone in a car to stew about that.

Up at 6:30am. Got Kate off to school, showered and had coffee and e-mail (not in that order). Bussed off to get my rental car, picked Kate up early from school, picked up her things at the house.

Drove to Oregon in tremendous traffic and periodic freeway-obscuring downpours. It was crazy weather and frustrating to drive in. Turns out the weather was spawning funnel clouds and other severe and dangerous conditions! Yikes.

Passed the Uncle Sam Billboard, maintained by a crank near Chehalis (which is "balanced" by the equally wacky but more sensitive Gospodor Monuments just a little further down the road). More on that tomorrow.

Crossed into Oregon and hit bumper-to-bumper traffic at a standstill in all lanes. Joy. Eventually cut off through the city and met my mom at work (only an hour late). More traffic and finally dropped her and Kate off for a weekend camping trip that's become something of a tradition for them.

Stopped back in Canby for a quick dinner with my brother, had pesto chicken breasts at Jarboe's. No great shakes, but far better than fast food on the freeway.

Drove back home, this time with far less traffic (I was actually able to use the rental car's cruise control!) and periodic but not freeway-obscuring rainfall.

Listened to Kid A on the last leg, perfect driving music.

Drove a total of 415 miles today, and I'm beat.

Yanked from Mollpeartree, because I hate not posting something to my blogs for so long.

LAST LONG CAR RIDE: Last trip to Vancouver with Ray and Christine, made all the longer because of the interminable wait at the border.
LAST KISS: Pramas. Mmm, Greek.
LAST GOOD CRY: The other day after I seeing that I was being lambasted in an online forum as meddlesome, manipulative, dishonest, and draconian. I'm too soft-hearted about these things, I know, but I had a good bawl over it anyway.
LAST MOVIE SEEN: The Deerhunter, how's that for depressing?
LAST LIBRARY BOOK CHECKED OUT: Haven't been to the library in years, I can't remember. Maybe I should check out the new Seattle Library, now that it's open.
LAST BEVERAGE DRANK: Coffee
LAST FOOD CONSUMED: tofu jerky
LAST CRUSH: Pramas. Mmm, Greek.
LAST PHONE CALL: Conference call from England this morning, always good fun.
LAST TV SHOW WATCHED: Emergency Animal Rescues with Kate
LAST TIME SHOWERED: Yesterday
LAST SHOES WORN: sandals
LAST CD PLAYED: NoFX, War on Errorism
LAST ITEM BOUGHT: plane ticket to Columbus
LAST ANNOYANCE: Reading the news headlines this morning
LAST ICE CREAM EATEN: Vanilla with caramel
LAST TIME WANTING TO DIE: oh hell, last year sometime? It's not an unusual state of mind for me.
LAST TIME SCOLDED: When I was two minutes late picking Kate up from gymnastics class, I got a public scolding from her cranky gym teacher.
LAST WEBSITE VISITED: www.cookinglight.com, for the recipe I'm using for dinner tonight.

Just wondering what folks think of Blogger's new comments function. Like it better than my old Haloscan comments? Not as much?

I can't decide what I think. I liked Haloscan's option of showing the commenter's webpage link, but I like the integration of the Blogger comments with the rest of the site.

Of course, this whole thing could change if I decide to make pMachine my main technological squeeze... still playing around with that idea.

Because there's no hope of me being able to put together anything coherent and it's been a week since I posted anything, some random thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head:

Kate has strep throat and is home from school. Three hours on the bus and at the pediatrician's today. She can't go to school until she's been on antibiotics for 24 hours. Bleh.

My roses are doing really well, the sunflowers seem to be taking root, and both the lilac and the rhodedendron I planted last fall rewarded me with blooms this year. The carrots, beans, squash, leeks and cherry tomatoes have taken off well in the vegetable garden, and the flowers along the side yard are blooming nicely, but the lavender and the mint I tried to start from seed have shown no sprouts for the second year in a row.

Angel series finale: anti-climactic. Was a great episode, very enjoyable, but as the series ender I felt a little let-down.

Sopranos: yeah baby, they've really been on a roll lately. For some reason Chris and I both thought this was the last season, and were pleased to find out that there's another year to look forward to.

I received a complaint from a guy who objected to the Nocturnal's book because of its "gratuitous nudity" and telling me that he had been looking forward to playing it with his kids. I'm still stunned about that one... pictures of creepy zombies, an undead gunslinger with his mouth stitched shut, Doc Horror probing the brains of an oozing corpse with a bloody tool, tentacled horrors man was not meant to know...all that's ok? Good wholesome family fun, that is! There is ONE single picture in the book that shows titty (and that's on a little pixie faerie creature) and a couple of shots of the water-creature member of the team in a bikini top in her human form, and all of a sudden it's whoa, stop the presses, save the children?

For the fourth time in a year, my health insurance company sent me a new set of cards. The instructions say that I'm supposed to show the "Physician's Visit" card first, to get a "discount on services" but specifically says on it "This is not insurance" and my damn doctor doesn't know what to do with it when I do show it. Showing it just causes me to be harrassed by the insurance nazis at the hospital before they'll let us check in to see Kate's doctor. Must get better insurance! Being self-employed sucks in that regard.

Seattle is having a tent caterpillar invasion, and I was forced to resort to lopping some branches off my apple tree to keep them from spreading all over my yard. I think I caught them in time. The apple tree looks like it will have a great deal of fruit (for the first time since we bought the house). Fingers crossed.

Gotta stop watching Deadwood before bed. I have dreams where GAMA politics get all bound up with drunks, gunslingers, and guys yelling about "fucking hoople-heads."

I'm going to be playing around with new templates and content. If you visit and find that things are not working, please be patient with me (I'm not nearly as skilled at this as I could be if I were a thoroughbred geek) and do let me know if something seems broken or ugly for a prolonged period!

Which Princess Bride Character are You?
this quiz was made by mysti

In the interest of spending a little time doing something for myself this weekend that didn't revolve around catching up on chores or the Origins Awards, I was inspired to give myself a little project. I pulled down 23 books (largely from the bookshelves next to the bed) and wrote down the opening sentence from each. Once I had the lines, I set about putting them together in an order that could possibly resemble a story. I'm actually pretty amused at how it turned out. The origin of each sentence is a different book and a different author, some more obvious than others. How many do you recognize?

Thundershowers hit just before midnight, drowning out the horn honks and noisemaker blare that usually signaled New Year's on the Strip, bringing 1950 to the West Hollywood Substation in a wave of hot squeals with meatwagon backup. There were prodigies and portents enough, One-Eye says.

The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards. From my first breath in this world, all I wanted was a good set of lungs and the air to fill them with – given circumstances, you might presume, for an American baby of the twentieth century. Maybe it comes from living in San Francisco, city of clammy humors and foghorns that warn and warn–omen, o-o-men, o dolorous omen, o dolors of omens– and not enough sun, but Wittman Ah Sing considered suicide every day. We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring. The night sky brightened faintly in the east with the approach of dawn as the Chosen entered the Gardens of Life.

It was four o'clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages began to arrive. The woman on the horse reined in her weary steed. She was called Isabelle, and when she was a small girl her hair had changed colour in the time it takes a bird to call to its mate. From between two trees at the crest of the hill a very old man watched, with a nostalgic longing he thought he'd lost all capacity for, as the last group of picnickers packed up their baskets, mounted their horses, and rode away south–they moved a little hastily for it was six miles back to London, and the red sun was already silhouetting the branches of the trees along the River Brent, two miles to the west.

A gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the tree, but the young girl beneath it did not seem to notice. Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen. The tall man stood at the edge of the porch.

A full moon shone over Sanctuary, revealing boats in its harbor, dwellings within and without its coiled walls. The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world's rim; and strange winds, blowing from a gulf no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the gray dust of corroding planets , the black ashes of extinguished suns. The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

The storm had broken. The cycle of our Earth (and indeed, our universe, if the truth had been known) was nearing its end and the human race had at last ceased to take itself seriously. It was starting to end, after what seemed most of eternity to me. It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.

So, at dinner Chris and Kate were discussing Chris's D&D pre-painted miniatures which are splayed out over the kitchen table.

They're talking, Kate is pointing, Chris is naming them, they're talking some more, and then Kate busts out with, "So, the mediocre jelly...."

::big damn grin::

Chris and I were going to try to hit an art flick on Friday, but ran into Adam in Capitol Hill and ended up missing BOTH showings. Blew my shot for fun. Had a fabulous dinner at The Green Papaya, took the bus home and immediately collapsed into bed. Spent the rest of the entire damn weekend working on Academy stuff. Not Mother's Day brunches for me!

It didn't take me long to realize that this week was going to suck, what with the Origins Awards nominees finally being announced. I've heard from people about all manner of things, including the "outrageous oversight" of not including dice ("Without DICE there would be NO GAMES!!!"), board game enthusiasts wondering how the nominees are picked, people railing at me that their favorite products didn't make the cut (or that their product that they worked on didn't make the cut) thus making the awards a joke, a sham, an insult...those who are demanding changes to acknowledge" the recent trend in games released and sold in the PDF format." Oh, its been pure joy, trust me.

Of course, one would think my life revolves around the Origins Awards or something, but that's just my volunteer position, so there's been an abundance of joy involved with my day job as well. That whole pesky day job thing, where I'm supposed to be earning my living and keeping a roof over my daughter's head, by making and selling good games. ("Good" obviously being the subject of acrimonious debate at the moment, of course.) I've had the additional joy of having to track down a rather significant payment that I expected to have arrived weeks ago, dealing with licensors (some of whom have been an absolute joy to work with, others who have been nothing short of hostile and obstructionist), listening to well-respected industry pundits spout off about professionalism all while knowing that when they worked for me they were outrageously late on their projects (and the extensions) without so much as an apology.

But really, what I feel the worst about, while all the outraged Origins howling has been going on was my poor, sweet girl. Kate attended her father's wedding over the weekend, and came home to find her beloved Silky dead in his cage. At literally the same time that I was reading the dozens of e-mails about the "outrage" of this or that thing getting or not getting public kudos, my baby was sobbing her heart out. Pramas writes about it in good detail at his website. I suspect Kate, though 8 years old and utterly brokenhearted (she sobbed in her bed until midnight), will have gotten over her confusion, sadness, and grief over Silky long before the adults in the game industry get over their anger, suspicion, jealousy, and partisan bickering that the Origins Awards seem to bring out in them.

Since I seem to have stumped the whole world with my ecclectic tastes, I've gone ahead and posted the answers to my 20 random iTunes songs.

1. Love's like a shot but works much quicker and you're a man who can hold his liquor. Here's to Love, Down with Love Soundtrack
2. I swear this one is going to last and all those other bastards were only practice. What Makes You Happy, Liz Phair
3. It's no use, I can't take no more abuse, I'm going to explode. I've Had It, Black Flag
4. I look to you and I see nothing, I look to you to see the truth. Fade Into You, Mazzy Star
5. I'll be your answer, I'll be your wish, I'll be your fantasy, your favorite dish. 100% Pure Love, Crystal Waters
6. I'm not waiting for the world to grab me by the balls and hold until I surrender, weeping. Observatory, Swingin' Utters
7. Hurry back, hurry back, to my arms, to my lips, and to my arms. Return to Me, Dean Martin
8. If you count to three, you'll see it's no emergency, you'll see I'm not the enemy. Prisoner of Society, The Living End
9. You say you're my friend, but you're one of them, one of them! My War, Black Flag... feeling very appropriate to me these days, I must say, great that it came up!
10. Everybody knows I'm on a crying jag. Been Where? Done What?
11. I know where I wanna go, but I just don't know, just don't know how to get there. Lost Again
12. I try to draw the line but it ends up running down the middle of me most of the time. Out of Range, Ani Difranco
13. I don't give a fuck about radio play, observe the English I display Parental Discretion iz Advised, NWA
14. I'm worst at what I do best and for this gift I feel blessed Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana
15. She's a model of disaster with a heart of revolution. Decom-poseur, NOFX
16. Feelings under covers like books on a shelf, if we're scared of one another must be scared of ourselves. The Crowd, Operation Ivy
17. I shouldn't be wearin' white and you can't afford no ring. White Trash Wedding, Dixie Chicks
18. He's old enough to know what's right, but young enough not to choose it. New World Man, Rush
19. Hypocrite coward never fought a real fight, when I see John I'm ashamed to be white. John Wayne Was a Nazi, MDC
20. I had high hopes, it lasted just a couple of gropes. Expiration Date 1/97, Pansy Division ... hilarious song about a guy who discovers his box of condoms has expired.