maellenkleth

This now means that the Nookronomicon is now outfitted with a TON more space. I’m thinking I’m going to put the Read books on the memory card, since access to files on it is noticeably slower than in main memory–but that’s fine since those will be lower priority books. The Read non-B&N books, anyway; I’m not sure if I want to bother to put the B&N books I’ve read there, since I’ve been just marking those as Archived on the device, which automatically removes them, and if I want them back I can just unarchive them. And I’ve got local copies on my computer.

This should be nifty, though! And now clearly I need LOTS MORE BOOKS to fill out all this nifty space. :D

Thanks very much, maellenkleth!

Also, these or these are always lovely.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about that. ;)

* By which I mean, that “roughly Solstice through late January time of year when I really shouldn’t be buying anything”, and
** By whom I mean, certain specific persons. If you’re not sure if you’re one of those specific persons, feel free to ignore this post!

Je suis une musicienne amateur. Je joue le piccolo, la flûte, et un peu de guitare et bouzouki. Je parle seulement un peu français. J’ai deux chats. Ils sont nommés Fred et George. J’ai lu un nombre ridicule de livres.

I particularly like that last one, since if I understand it correctly, it’s “I’ve read a ridiculous number of books.” Thank you, compound past tense!

Also, it occurred to me that one phrase right out of my beloved “Trois Navires de Ble” from GBS makes grammatical sense to me, too. I.e., the chorus: “sur le bord de l’eau nous irons jouer dans l’île”, or, “at the edge of the water we will play on the island”. A good chunk of that song still doesn’t parse to me, but that line does. It’s responsible for me being able to parse the title of the Le Vent song “Au bord de la fontaine”, and it’s why I could parse the chorus of La Volée’s “Belle, embarquez!”, too, since “sur l’bord de l’eau” is in that. (Note the smooshing of “le bord” into “l’bord”. I am advised by cow that Quebecois French likes to do that kind of thing!)

So this is all fun! I’ve started slapping lyrics onto the various song files in my iTunes collection, so that I can read along with them as I listen on the bus going to and from work. It is helping LOTS for my ability to comprehend these words as words.

And that of course points me at an important musical verb: jouer!

So I can say Je joue le piccolo, la flûte, la guitare, et le bouzouki. The important thing for me to note here also is which noun gets ‘le’ and which one gets ‘la’. Why piccolo gets ‘le’ and flûte gets ‘la’, damned if I know! But that’s the wacky fun of a language that does gendered nouns. I remember running into that all the time as well with German.

(Wherein that same sentence I just quoted becomes Ich spiele Piccolo, Flöte, Gitarre und der Bouzouki, according to Google Translate, but I must be dubious about that sentence slapping a ‘der’ in there when none of the other nouns get one.)

I just bought the ebook edition of the book 501 French Verbs (the print version of which maellenkleth very kindly sent me!), and it tells me ‘jouer’ is considered an essential verb for students. Certainly it is relevant to my interests! And present tense conjugation looks pretty easy. I will need to see if I can practice this one!

All of which should warn y’all that I’m going to be Frenchgeeking periodically on this blog, as I inch my way into trying to figure out more of the words of all this Quebecois trad I’ve been listening to! Again, mad props to maellenkleth for pointing me at that verb book, and I’m on the hunt for French translations of any of my favorite SF/F authors as well. If I can get hold of any French editions of anything by jimbutcher, mizkit, katatomic, cmpriest, andpuff, or Julie Czerneda, that would be particularly awesome. :D

ETA: Fixing the spelling of jouer up above. I keep making the typo joeur, oops! Thanks to llachglin for the catch!

solarbird and spazzkat have been devoted PAX-goers for some years now, which has never surprised me as they’ve been both devoted Penny Arcade readers as well as console gamers.

Me, I’ve never really been a console gamer, though I have a very healthy respect for the amount of detail and craft that goes into a good console game. Even if I don’t like to play them much myself, I love watching others do so if the game is suitably immersive; I had great fun, for example, watching both Dara and Paul play Portal and Portal II. Casual games have been more my speed, even before I started working for Big Fish. But nonetheless, Dara and Paul have been encouraging me to try PAX out. So I bought a one-day pass this year to give it a go.

I didn’t see nearly as many costumes as I typically do at a general science fiction convention, but I did see enough to note with satisfaction that why yes, I was indeed among My Tribe. Best costumes I spotted were a Fifth Doctor accompanied by a couple of girls in scanty “Dalek” costumes, mostly notable by their short skirts decorated with Dalek bumps and how they were both carrying around plungers. But we also spotted a girl dressed up like Ulala from the Dreamcast game Space Channel 5, which was cool, and Dara got a pic of me with her. I spotted a Tenth Doctor as well, and a Han Solo, and two guys dressed up like Beer and Bacon (to which my immediate reaction was OH LOOK TWO OF THE MAJOR GEEK FOOD GROUPS). There were other costumes I didn’t recognize but which were clearly based on various game characters.

Many mad props to the PopCap group doing the Disco Zombies from Plants Vs. Zombies, too. :D Four or five of ‘em, all dressed up like PvZ zombies, doing coordinated disco moves! They were handing out bumper stickers saying “I’D RATHER BE EATING BRAINS”, and I was happy to snag one of those.

I found the expo floor mostly too big and too noisy, which didn’t surprise me much–given that that space is pretty much given over to mostly console game booths, that generates a whole helluva lot of noise. But that said, I did enjoy walking around and looking at what was being offered, just to see if anything looked at all relevant to my interests.

The Rocksmith booth had I think the biggest console-type game I might actually play. I was very, very intrigued by the idea of a Guitar Hero-style game, only with real guitars, that you can use to actually learn the instrument. Granted, it’s oriented towards rock guitar rather than the stuff I’m actually interested in playing (i.e., Celtic/trad), but nonetheless, the technology impressed me. I don’t know if I’d actually go out and buy the game for myself, but if it shows up in the house, I’ll totally play with it. And I may even be tempted to get a pickup put into the General, given that the people running the booth specifically said that yes, an acoustic with a pickup in it would talk to the game just fine.

Mad, mad props to the Citizen Skywatch booth for best booth experience, hands down. It was entirely in character, with several people in costume playing the roles of people recruiting for the Citizen Skywatch organization. The booth was decorated with all sorts of 50′s-era props and posters with messages like “WHY HAVE OUR SKIES TURNED AGAINST US?” and “IT’S THEM–OR US!” And there was a map purporting to track all sorts of strange events, newspaper clippings, and the like. Once you got into the booth proper there was a “doctor” and a “nurse” giving people exams and asking them to swear oaths of loyalty to President Eisenhower and that they have never been members of the Communist Party–and they were very clever and funny in doing this, too. The doctor character grabbed Paul from behind me in the line, and only after did Paul laughingly tell Dara and me that the doctor guy had asked him, “Do you know that woman?” (I.e., ME.) “Is she a Communist? Are you SURE?” I have no idea whatsoever what the actual game is like, but the setup of that booth alone was hysterical, and I totally want to see the game now.

We stopped briefly at the booth for Fruit Ninja as well, a Kinect game, since Dara wanted in on the drawing they were doing to give away a free Kinect. The game didn’t overwhelm us particularly, but it was fun seeing the little kid in the line ahead of us totally go to town with the chopping motions to take out all the fruit on the screen.

Other than that, though, I was mostly interested in what few iOS games were available on the edges of the expo floor, and up on the second floor of booths as well. I particularly liked playing around with Minor Lords and Jetpack Joyride, both of which should be coming out tomorrow and which I plan to buy. Dara and I had a very giggle-worthy time going head to head on Presidents Vs. Presidents, which is cooperative play on an iPad getting cartoon-ified presidents into boxing matches. I was Lincoln, Dara was Chester A. Arthur, and I won! Got a t-shirt. \0/

Also quite liked the Gamebook Adventures booth by Tin Man Games. They’ve got these nifty game apps that are sort of a cross between fantasy novels, Choose Your Own Adventure, and light combat RP, and in fact the guy in the booth pitched the apps to me as Choose You Own Adventure, only about six times as long and with more complex storylines. There’s also nice art scattered all throughout the pages of the app as well. I grabbed the first one and got a coupon code for one of the later ones as well, and I look forward to playing through those.

I wasn’t so much interested in going to the big famous PAX panels, like the live D&D game or the one where Gabe and Tycho draw a strip in front of an audience, mostly because those get huge queues and I’d already spent a big chunk of time in a queue to get into the expo room and expected to do so again to get into the concerts. So most of the day went to wandering around the expo room, though we did check out the Halo Fest exhibit as well; I don’t play Halo, but it was kind of cool to see all the stuff in there, especially the highly detailed combat diorama scenes.

In the evening, of course, were the concerts. This was the other big thing I was interested in, in no small part because I’d never seen Jonathan Coulton perform before. The experience was, sadly, rather mixed. Standing in the queue was decently fun given that we were all geeks and perfectly happy to entertain ourselves, and once or twice people spontaneously started singing JoCo songs. Once the show got started, the two big issues with it quickly surfaced: i.e., the sound and the lighting. The sound mix was awful, and I could barely hear the vocals over the instrumentation. And, given where Dara and Paul and I were sitting, the lighting periodically stabbed me RIGHT IN THE EYES, so I had to spend at least half the time with my eyes closed. Which was vexing.

Massive points off as well to whoever decided that JoCo was not going to be the final act. The actual first act was not music–it was another round of the weekend-long Omegathon, which was entertaining enough; that was a few pairs of guys competing in a dance-off to a Kinect game, of all things. The first act of actual music was Paul and Storm, who I’d also never seen perform. I found them about 25 percent hysterical, 65 percent decently entertaining, and 10 percent really, REALLY annoying; two of their songs in particular I could have done very much without, but on the other hand, their song about the boxing nuns was great, and so was Ten-Fingered Johnny.

JoCo himself was about as awesome as I expected, modulo the awful lighting and sound, which made it difficult for me to appreciate the songs I didn’t already know. But I DID get a big kick out of several thousand geeks all singing “ALL WE WANNA DO IS EAT YOUR BRAINS!” I’d like to see JoCo again, only, like, y’know, in a venue where I can actually hear him.

The last act was a band called Supercommuter, which we knew nothing about. And it really kind of sucked that they had to follow JoCo, because the crowd left en masse when his set was done. I felt a little guilty about it, but not so much that I wanted to stay, especially not given the bad sound and lighting. Dara made a point of stopping to buy their CD on the way out, though.

Seriously, though, they should not have followed Coulton. That’s just crazytalk.

All in all… one day of PAX was about the right amount of PAX for me. Some level of disappointment, but not enough to overwhelm the fun parts, and it’s likely I’ll come back next year for another one-day shot.

solarbird

The core of this is this music festival in St. John’s. I’ve wanted to hear Newfoundland music on Newfoundland soil for a while now, and so when I saw Mr. Hallett of the B’ys tweet about this, I went HEY! Also, I do have writing-related reasons I want to see St. John’s, as those of you who’ve read Faerie Blood have probably heard me mention–and I’m given to understand that if you want to visit Newfoundland, July-August is about the window wherein the weather is probably not going to suck.

But! The Trainventure part of this comes in with how Dara and I want to take the train across the country rather than fly, and stop in interesting places on the way. brightbeak has already favored me with a wealth of recommendations if we get to stop in her neck of the woods in New Brunswick. I will however very definitely welcome other recommendations on Interesting Places to Stop, keeping in mind that our travel route will be between Vancouver and St. John’s, and that I’ll probably have about three weeks’ total time to play with, the core of which will be the festival.

Also, for those of you who actually are in Newfoundland, if you have any recommendations on good little hotels or bed-and-breakfast type places that Dara and I might stay in in St. John’s when we’re there, I will totally want to hear them.

And if any of you want to arrange to see us, let me know! Actual details won’t be hammered out until early 2012 probably, but I wanted to get the word out just so interested people can start discussing it with me. :)

solarbird

This is important because we want to go to VCON next month! One, we want another excuse to visit Vancouver, and the B’ys have not favored us with another Vancouver show on the tour schedule yet this year. Two, it’s a fairly tiny convention and we’re looking forward to attending a convention Dara doesn’t actually have to work. Three, we haven’t had a formal vacation this year, and don’t have one scheduled, so this’ll be a bit of a mini-vacation!

So I’m going to have to fill out the forms for reporting a passport lost and applying for a new one. Fortunately the courthouse down in Lake Forest Park takes the appropriate forms, AND they have Saturday hours. So I’m going to get that done and dealt with next weekend, and pay the fee to expedite a new passport, and hopefully that’ll get VCON all squared away. We have hotel reservations but we don’t have train tickets yet.

Anyway–yo, Vancouver peeps, if there’s any chance you’ll also be at that convention, let Dara and me know! It’d be nice to see you.

And in no particular order, here are things I’ve noticed about it:

One, once I rebooted into the new OS, things were quite a bit sluggish for several minutes–but there were two reasons for that. One, Spotlight went and reindexed everything on the drive. Two, I launched Mail as pretty much one of the first things, and that also needed to do significant updating of its database. So things were pretty pokey until both of these finished up their business.

Two, trying to launch iTunes got me an error message about not being able to open an iTunes Library file, but this was easily fixed by doing a quick check for software updates and downloading iTunes 10.4. iTunes then proceeded to load as per normal.

Three, goddamn, Mail is very… gray now. I’m not sure I approve of that, but we’ll see if it grows on me. Ditto for the new gray scrollbars.

Four, I quite like Launchpad, a new icon at the top of the Dock that’s basically a quick and dirty way to get at all of the apps on your system. If you’re an iPhone or iPad owner this interface will look very familiar, and it lets you swipe through it as well if you have a touchpad on your laptop like I do. You’re supposed to be able to organize the icons into folders like you do on iDevices, but I haven’t tried that yet. I like it less because of the similarity to iOS and more just because it means I can lose several less commonly used icons off my Dock.

Five, I discovered entirely by accident that you can set individual desktop backgrounds on the individual desktops available in the new Mission Control feature–which is cool. It’s a much nicer version of Spaces + Expose and even after playing with it for only a few moments, I’m grooving on it. And now I can go fwip-fwip-fwip-fwip through the Dashboard and all four of my desktops in a quick line, and I see LION! ELEPHANT! ISLAND! GREAT BIG SEA! It’s neat.

Six, if I have a Terminal window up and I’m connected to the MurkMUSH and I get paged, the icon starts bouncing at me and showing a little number on it indicating there’s something that needs my attention. Didn’t do that before.

Seven, hrmm, the Ars Technica review was talking about the dots on icons on the Dock that indicate which ones are launched going away. However, I still see mine!

Time Machine is now doing a massive 9.52GB backup–over our house LAN, no less, so this’ll be a while. But on the whole the upgrade appears to have gone swimmingly. I still need to verify that I can reboot into Win7 as needed, and that I can also launch Parallels to run that Win7 install as a VM, as before. (I did update Parallels since they deployed an update to talk to Lion, or so they took pains to inform users.)

Also still need to see if Safari’s new Reading List feature will seduce me off of Firefox, and what the new document handling model will be like once I get a hold of a version of a word processor that can talk to it. (Mac Word 2008 does not.)

But so far so good. And oh yes, speaking of Mac Word 2008–if you’re using Mac Office on your system, you WILL need 2008 or later if you want to upgrade to Lion, what with Rosetta support being removed. Be on the lookout as well if you’re at all reliant on Microsoft Query, which is part of Excel. That was one of my few PPC apps left on the system, and a bit of judicious Googling showed me that Microsoft has word out that they’re advising anyone reliant on Query to not upgrade yet until they fix that. They’re also reporting that Outlook is having trouble importing data out of Mail once Lion is installed, so people this might affect should keep an eye out for that.

AND! Since I am a Big Fish employee, it does behoove me to point out that older Big Fish releases, being PowerPC games, won’t run on Lion either. Be on the lookout for our powers that be to issue word on what Mac customers should do about those specific games. If there are particular games you don’t want to lose the ability to run yet, you might hold off a bit on the OS install.

More as I observe it! (And dammit, why don’t I have a Lion icon for posting to LJ and Dreamwidth?)

And yet. When solarbird and I went to my Grandma Hyson’s funeral this week, I did feel it necessary to do a few things.

One of these was, on Monday afternoon, going to see the house where I grew up. The neighborhood looked surprisingly unchanged from my childhood memories–although of course smaller in scale to my 42-year-old eyes than it’d been when I was small, or even a teenager. 902 itself, the house my father helped build for us, looked quite a bit smaller in particular and it did have changes. The shutters are solid white now, instead of the green with white borders that they’d been when I was a child, and the house numbers are new. There is only one tree in the front yard now rather than two, and that tree is significantly taller and thicker around than the maple saplings I remember.

The big ditch by the house is the same, though–the ditch that’s big enough to be labelled “Slop Ditch” on maps of Louisville, a ditch whose size hadn’t ever really registered with Dara until she actually saw it, at which point she proceeded to inform me that it was really more of a big creek or maybe even a small river. The thick summer plant life growing all along the banks, another thing that fit well with my memory, is certainly river-like.

Preston Highway, at least where my old street intersected with it, also looked much the same. I pointed out to Dara the church we’d attended, as well as the building that used to be the movie theater where I first saw Star Wars, and which is now (sadly) a Verizon store. The huge hardware store I remembered on the corner was still there, although the building I remembered as white is more of a silvery-gray now. And the tiny convenience shop just around the way from that hardware store, the Easy Shop which was my impetus to walk six entire blocks from home because that was where the candy was, isn’t there anymore at all. That made me kind of sad.

We went over to see my old elementary school as well, since that wasn’t too far away, and that too seemed a lot smaller than I ever remembered. But we also wound up wandering to a part of Louisville that hadn’t ever been a part of my childhood: the Bardstown neighborhood, which turned out to be surprisingly congenial to Seattleites used to walkable streets. I could have easily seen Bardstown, with its walkable main street and street parking for several surrounding blocks, as a neighborhood hub in Seattle. And since it has a huge comic book store as well as a nice little coffee shop and a used book exchange, I am fairly sure it must be a haven for geeks all over Louisville.

Monday night sent Dara and me to Lexington. We dropped in on starsongky and gazerwolf, and had a lovely chat with them; then we went out to dinner with our old friend Brent and another acquaintance from LexFA, David, and that was lovely too.

Tuesday was of course Grandma’s funeral, and as funerals go, it was… not bad, actually. It was nice to spend a couple of hours just hanging out with the family, sharing conversation and a lot of old pictures, especially many old pictures of Grandma that I’d never seen before. Dara and I were also even introduced to an old high school friend of my aunt Kim’s–who, it turns out, is an SF geek herself and is someone whose path we fleetingly crossed attending Rivercons while we were still in Kentucky. So that was pretty neat.

So was what Dara told me after we got home: that a friend of my aunt Teresa’s, while Dara had stepped outside, had given her a bit of a look and asked, “Are you the outdoorsy type? Do you like to hike?” To wit: LOL, of the very, very old school variety.

The actual service turned out to be surprisingly informal and sweet, as it was officiated by a gentleman who wasn’t actually a pastor. But he was an old, old friend of Grandma’s family, the Careys, and had spoken at previous Carey funerals. His name was Billy Maxie, and he rambled quite a bit about the history of Grandma’s family. Two things that he said, though, stood out for me.

One was that the Careys, he said, were always singers. That if you met a Carey, you’d know that they’d automatically be good at singing, and how they’d always be leading the singing at church and such. He said that if any of us with Carey blood found ourselves just singing, that that would be the Carey genes expressing themselves.

I couldn’t help but think of me walking to at from work, belting out Great Big Sea. And I had to smile.

And the other was something awesome that I don’t think I’d ever known, or if I did I’d forgotten: that Grandma was one of the many millions of women who, during World War II, worked in the factories while their menfolk went off to war. Aunt Kim backed this up afterwards by saying that Grandma had built airplanes, and she’d always had a hard time envisioning her mother with power tools. My Aunt Teresa says that Grandma had also been a bit of a clothes horse and loved her fancy dresses, and hated wearing the “dungarees” that they were required to wear at the factories!

Mr. Maxie finished up though by doing something really, really sweet: saying that as a member of the Disabled American Veterans, he’d paid a lot of respect to men who’d served during WWII. This time, though, he was going to do it for my grandma, because he firmly believed that the women who did their part by working in those factories were every bit as deserving of the same respect as the men who’d done the fighting. And so he stepped in front of my Grandma’s casket and very formally saluted her.

I teared up at that. That, all by itself, made me happy I was there.

Dara and I both got to have a bit of a chat with Mr. Maxie after, and he was startled to see that Dara had her mandolin with her–because he had in fact intended to have another gentleman play mandolin for him during the service, but that gent had not been able to make it. Mr. Maxie told Dara that if he’d known she’d had a mandolin, he’d have put her to work. And he seemed pleased to learn that I myself was of Carey blood, and that I did sing a bit.

Afterwards, because I had never actually seen it and because my mom was buried in the same cemetery, I told my brothers and sisters I wanted to see Mom’s headstone. So we went over there to pay our respects, bringing Marc’s and Sarah’s children with us. It was a bit of a crowd with the great lot of us, and it turns out that Mom is in kind of crowded company. But I was happy, in a wistful kind of way, to at least see the place where she rests.

Then we all convened at my uncle Randy’s house and hung out together for several more hours, eating food, chatting, and looking at a great many more old pictures.

Like this one, which is perhaps one of the earliest ones of Grandma in the entire set of pictures I saw. I’ve come home with the originals of a lot of the pictures I looked at, but this one in particular was old enough that I didn’t want to separate it from the rest. So I just snapped a pic of it in turn with my iPhone, just so that I can show you all an even younger picture of my Grandma, and a glimpse of the Stylish Young Miss that she was. I think that pose of her is adorable.

Stylish Young Miss

Tuesday night, after Dara and I parted ways with my family, we wandered off to the one other part of Louisville (aside from my middle school and high school from downtown) that I could remember with any immediate clarity: Jefferson Mall, which had always been the “good” mall when I was a kid, and which still periodically shows up in dreams of mine, heavily mutated, as the upper level of a dreamscape Nethack game. I remembered the L-shape of the place, and the skylights over the food court, and I had a very, very niggling memory of the Willis Music where I might even have gotten that ancient orange Elvis songbook I have once again, thanks to my brother.

There were thunderstorms Tuesday afternoon and evening, clearing out the awful heat and humidity that had made most of Monday unbearable. A good thunderstorm is one of the few things aside from my family that I do miss about Kentucky, and I was happy to see that one. A parting gift from the state, as it were.

And I bought a Louisville shirt in the airport, on the way home.