Day: September 16, 2010

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Update to “Safehold” Critique

Esther Friesner’s got it right:

Goot eeeevening. Velcome to my eeeentroduction. Enter freely and—

SLAP!!!

Whew. Thanks. I needed that…

…Campy faux Transylvanian is jangly enough to the innocent ear, but when the reader’s eye must wrestle with that dreadfully twisted orthography, it becomes the realm of Cruel and Unusual Punishment.

And we don’t want that. We love our readers. We cherish our readers. We want our readers to be happy.

It’s be nice if David Weber took her advice to rectify his irritating naming convention in his Safehold series.

Granted, Esther Friesner’s humorous series of “Chicks in Chainmail” and “witches, werewolves and vampires in… Suburbia” stories are in a lighter vein, but readability shouldn’t be dependent on genre. (I wish James Joyce could hear that from the grave… even though he’swriting as much now as I wish he ever had *heh*)

BTW, if you think I think (yeh, as little as possible and only when I have to*heh*) readers of this space might enjoy Friesner’s wacky–yet respectful of her readers’ time and sensibilities *cough*, such as they might be–approach to her topics, then you’re right. From the intro to Fangs for the Mammaries*–

As I might have mentioned in the Introductions to previous anthologies, Suburbia has become a very easy target for the Hip, the Hot, the Artsy, and the Artsy-with-a-capital-F. Thus I promise not to yield to the urge to make vampire-slanted puns about how Suburbia bites, sucks, is dead, drains your blood, drives you batty, etc.

It is one thing to shoot fish in a barrel. It is another thing to bring flamethrowers into play against beached guppies.

Except I pretty much just did that, didn’t I? Oops.

*heh*

*Yes, it’s an anthology of (mostly) others’ stories set in Friesner’s unique world, still her vision.

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Well, It’s About Time

I’ve been running Opera 10.70.3488 on my Windows boxes for some time now. Yes, it’s still beta, but remarkably stable. I’ve been avoiding some builds with known regressions I don’t want to mess with, but in a few mins now, I’ll start moving my Windows boxes to Opera 10.70.9047.

The Linux compies will have to wait for tomorrow. Why? My cable service is experiencing a severe hitch in its getalong, tonight. SPent an hour w/so-called customer support just to finally get to a service person who would do a check to see that, yes, my (brand new Motorola SB 6120) modem was indeed just hunky dory, and that the problem was very obviously NOT on my end.

The Win version is just a 12MB download, but instead of being virtually instantaneous, it’s taking 15 minutes or so to struggle downstream to me.

And don’t even get me talking about upload “speeds”.

Readers here will recall this isn’t the first time I’ve had these issues, although almost all of them have been in the last year or so. And despite the ever worsening customer “service” and the maddening service outages and slowdowns, this is still the best option in internet service here in America’s Third World County, by an order of magnitude. Literally.

*sigh*

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In Re: the “Challenge of the Sith”

LC Aggie Sith has issued a challenge of sorts. I say, “of sorts” because the ground rules are rather vague. I’m not sure, for example, if not doing this correctly will result in a duel to the death with light sabers or simply the scorn of the blogosphere, but oh, well…

1. I like dogs. No great revelation, but as much as I like ’em, we don’t have one in the family right now. Was offered a really nice Pit Bull pup about a week ago, but…

2. I hated beer for most of my life. Then I discovered stuff that was unlike the typical “better poured back into the horse it came out of” manufactured American gagme. Beer: the second Holy Brew.

3. I don’t like coffee. I love it. But for the next few weeks, I’m off the stuff. Don’t ask. I won’t tell. 🙂

4. I’m handy with my hands. A regular Mr Fixit. But right now almost all my tools I need for projects at twc central are languishing elsewhere, so I’m less handy than usual.

5. I have a couple of degrees I don’t use at all. Anyone want ’em?

6. I was 38 before I got “hooked” by computers. A (moderately) late model Tandy TRS-80 did me in. The addiction has only worsened as I’ve aged.

7. Spicy? You think you like spicy? Try some of my habanero sauce. 😉 Jalapeños are for the kiddie table.

8. I’ve put over 250,000 miles on each of more cars than I even want to recall. Traveling’s no longer my thing. Short jaunts into the piney woods of America’s Third World County are about my speed anymore.

9. I have relatively small feet. Make of it what you will.

10. I have more scars than you do. Do too. *heh*

There. Do I get a bunny or a face-off with light sabers?