Erratica Reduex

Our friends know the details now. Our car was stolen on Sunday, as we watched the Cherry Blossom parade in San Francisco's Japantown with digitalsidhe and feyandstrange .. After contacting various agencies and people, the San Francisco police let us know that they had found our car (major, MAJOR props to the policeman who helped us out). Unfortunately they notified us of this right after Feyandstrange had driven us back to San Jose. After we arrived back in San Francisco, we found out our car had been taken to the city impound lot, and furthermore there was something like a $430.00 bill for towing and storage, with $50.00 added every day. More props to the police lot attended who pointed out that our insurance company could not only pay the bill, but also send someone to retrieve the car. Then going well beyond the call of duty Feyandstrange drove us back home. I mean wow. I have awesome friends, but this is seriously one of the most awesome things I have ever personally seen someone do.  Thank you seems so incredibly mild for how I feel.

So, on the upside:
The game on Saturday: it was great to be back in our 4E game, and I like my mage's gradual increase in effectiveness.
The Cherry Blossom festival: a hell of a lot of fun, from children in kimonos, to a large variety of pretty princesses, to enthusiastic kodo drummers. It was totally worth the 50 mile walk (uphill both ways) from the apartment to the parade route.
Excellent Japanese food.
Excellent company
Feyandstrange and digitalsidhe being completely, totally awesome.
Finding out our car was found.
Getting my taxes completed, and for about $2000 dollars less than I thought it would cost on Friday.

Downside:
My considering how out of shape I am that a mere walk of fifty miles uphill both ways should wind me so badly.
My replicating San Francisco weather: freezing than warm than freezing than warm...and the lowlands (feet) being warm while the upper areas (ears) get wind chilled.
Coming back to realize that white car was not OUR car.
Being pretty much useless in the evening, not even remembering any of the important numbers.
Staggering around downtown SanFran, needing the help of my cane around 3:00 AM on Monday.
A massive bill from SanFran towing.
Contemplating the almost certain loss of a valued knife, and several library books. Hardbacks no less.
Having to take the train up to SanFran tomorrow to get our car back (

But all in all, we have a lot to be grateful for, especially our friends. And for one last note:

PARK IN THE PARKING GARAGES NOT THE STREET!

While doing a bit of research on Usenet, I stumbled across this old story. It's nowhere near the worst gaming story I've heard (the game with the police and prostitutes is definitely worse), but this one is pretty much the most amusingly bad example of railroading I've ever read. And so:


Seriously, can anyone come up with a worse example?

For the background of a character, I have been doing some research on top female rock guitarists. This has been a bit harder than it seems, because while female rock vocalists are somewhat common, female rock guitarists seem invisible. In fact, Rolling Stone’s list of the “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” only listed two women. It's almost like it's saying women can't do rock guitar, an odd attitude in this day and age.

Fortunately Elle and Venus Zone came to the rescue with respectively, 12 Greatest Female Guitarists, and The Greatest Female Guitarists of All Time. the latter list of 46 artists is really fascination: I've been introduced to Orianthi Panagaris, Kristin Hersh, Cordell Jackson, Kaki King, and The Great Kat, and all the others
.
And the man still considers himself a critic? Crap.

Well, at least I have a much firmer grip on my character; the technical part was easy, but getting her headspace was hard. At least now I have a much better idea of whatt she'd have to put up with.

The Television Tropes wiki has introduced a new service, called Useful Notes, which is a collection of more-or-less factual articles designed to inform and educate readers, and "debunk common media stereotypes". In other words, it's to do much the same thing that TV Tropes was originally created to do.  It's interesting that TV Tropes has become so huge and unwieldy it needs a fact page, but not that surprising. I personally think that some time ago TV Tropes passed the point of usability and is now just about how many video game and anime series references one can fit to a given trope.

I've also been hearing from some writers that TV Tropes has become an active detriment to their writing anything. Some have told me that they develop a writer's block after reading TV Tropes, and others have mentioned that they get too depressed to write. In both case, they state thhe problem as being "WEll, all the tropes have been done before, so I can't do anything original.

I can't help but think this is a product of Television Topes own success. TV Tropes used to be useful both in describing some of the "Cheats" that writers used, and in pointing out the cliched, racist and sexist elements in TV shows. However I'm starting to see it used as a substitute for actually describing what's going on in a given piece of fiction. Believe it or not there IS a difference between Madmen and Supernatural, even if they share some tropes- which I know they do, because ALL shows share tropes. That's where I suspect the sense of depression really comes in, from knowing that one's work won't actually be judged for what it has to say or the quality of our writing, but merely cataloged on what tropes people can glom onto. It's description as a substitute for criticism.

Not only has the situation become like that joke where prisoners simply say the numbers of jokes, TV Tropes is rapidly becoming prescriptive, not descriptive. I've actually heard writers say "Well, I'm doing a story about subject X, so according to TV Tropes, I need to have Tropes A, B, and G-R in it. Hell, I can practically do my writing by numbers now." It's like an author listening too much to what fans want to see- the end result is Piers Anthony.

I suppose the answer could be as simple as a writer not reading TV Tropes, but TV Tropes has had a valuable role to play in pointing out bad writing and cliches, especially those that are racist, sexist, or other-ist. And of course it leaves the problem of other people putting too much emphasis into TV Tropes. Maybe it's just time to start over, or do some vigorous editing of the site?

What do you all think?

Your computer may be possessed by a demon!,

...so warns the Reverend Jim Peasboro, a leading minister (leading exactly who or what, I have to wonder).

While Even I have to admit that at first glance this may explain some of the more bizarre aspects of one's least favorite computer or software manufacturer (go ahead, pick one), I have to wonder if things such as:

"Decent, happily married family men were drawn irresistibly to pornographic websites and forced to witness unspeakable abominations. "Housewives who had never expressed an impure thought were entering Internet chat rooms and found themselves spewing foul, debasing language they would never use normally. "

Or:

" Then the device went haywire and started printing out what looked like gobbledygook. "I later had an expert in dead languages examine the text," the minister said. "It turned out to be a stream of obscenities writt5 aen in a 2,800-year-old Mesopotamian dialect!"

...might have different explanations. Like say, accidentally logging onto Usenet groups, or reading Youtube comments. Somebody even more cynical may say that pornography and foul language may be the sort of thing that christians regularly indulge in when behind closed doors, and that demons is just a handy excuse.

However, I should bring up one potentially important thing that the the Reverend seems to have missed. If any computer made after 1985 has the memory capacity to hold a demon, wouldn't that mean that your average Blackberry, iPhone or Droid would have enough memory to do the same? So why don't we have swarms of possessed phones, texting blasphemy, making their screens rotate, or the like? Why are we stuck with the mundane annoyances of smart phones?

Could it be that phone carriers are too evil even for El Diablo? Hmm.

There really needs to be a variant on the Goodwin's Law that states "As an internet Star Wars discussion grows longer, the probability of a debate as to whether the Empire is evil approaches one."

At that point we can conclude that just like in the threads described by the original Goodwin's Law, the Star Wars thread will continue, but the actual information content will be zero.

So I was just now sitting on the couch petting Alice - the more social, good-natured of our cats- when she did something totally unprecedented for her. She was deliriously enjoying being petted, when suddenly she stiffened, and actually growled deep in her throat. Not at me; she jumped down, raced around the coffee table, and jumped up on the other end of the couch, to stare fixedly, wide eyed at the front door. I heard nothing at all, but just as a precaution, I reached behind me and locked the door, before getting up to have a look.

There was no bug (and she wouldn't growl at a bug either), and I saw nobody through the peephole. Finally I opened the door- there was nobody there. Alice has settled down, but she's still keeping an eye on he door. I wonder what's going on?

Context:





Oh. That's who. How utterly humiliating.

Anyway, that's what I got when I did the writing analysis of my last "Under the Green Moon" story. When I tossed some character backgrounds for a Heroquest game into the shredder I got:





*sigh* Is it too early in the day to start drinking heavily yet?

A legal letter I wrote to the government received this result:





You heard it here people! Margaret Atwood reads like a formal appeal to a labor relations board!

Finally, I tried my resume:





Maybe I should stick to writing resumes. Or maybe I should just crawl under the bed with the cats.

Edit: links taken out due to site being a vanity press.

Over on the Extraordinary Observations blog, Rob Pitingolo comments on the fact that bicycling seems to be mainly a practice of people from the middle to upper income brackets. He speculates that the primary reason low-income people fail to use the new bike paths is due to culture. In my time in low-income neighborhoods, I've also observed a low usage of bicycles among the citizenry. I agree that culture may be considered, bnut that  an overbroad explanation for behavior that may have some practical roots. There's a couple of factors in bicycle use that could preclude it from being a common transportation mode in low-income areas, ones that well-to-do bikers might not consider.

First of all road infrastructure should be mentioned- not only in terms of repair, but the function of the roads. Bicyclists tend to come from areas that have roads with relatively low traffic, that are designed to accommodate bicyclists and pedestrians as well as cars. Many low-income residents on the other hand tend to live in mixed-use areas, with heavy commuter, freight and other traffic, making bicycling actively dangerous. For an example, my residential neighborhood is separated from San Jose proper by an industrial section, and several very busy streets that cross the freeway and that include on and off-ramps. Between the trucks, service vehicles, students going to the university, and harried commuters, crossing into downtown is moderately hazardous for cars and pedestrians. It would be dangerous to commute to the city proper on a bike. However, outside of taking a several mile detour, there is no direct bike-accessible route between South San Jose and the downtown. It's likely that even if a bike route across the freeway was established, the surrounding area would be considered dangerous enough

Secondly, there is the capital outlay that needs to be considered. Bicycles are nearly always secondary for the wealthy, however, low income people can generally only afford only one vehicle- and the price for a decent bike and a car that can be "made runnable" isn't as different as it may seem. Given a choice between a vehicle that has limited cargo and passenger capacity and foul-weather use, a car is a more practical choice.

Bicycles require a degree of mechanical knowledge to keep in good shape, mechanical knowledge that generally isn't as available in low-income communities. While nearly everyone knows someone who has mechanical knowledge, and who can teach the basics of keeping a car maintained, unless there's a pre-established culture of bicyclists in a community, learning how to maintain a bicycle may be difficult.

Finally, there is the problem in establishing a bicycling culture in the first place; generally before bicycles are thought of as commuter vehicles, they are thought of as toys for children.; In low-income families, a bicycle for a child may be considered a major expense. Combined with neighborhoods that are perceived as not generally considered safe for bicyclists, then a culture of seeing a bicycle as a practical vehicle will have difficulty in arising. In my time in low-income neighborhoods, I've rarely seen children riding bicycles anywhere except in the safety of parking lots, under the watchful eyes of parents.

This isn't to say that these are the only, or even primary reasons that bicycle use isn't common in low income areas. I've done no formal survey; these are merely my impressions from living in low-income areas.

With lots of colorful terms.

Of course it's Daily Kos, so who knows what sinister agenda lurks behind these comments. Still, Fishgrease has the ring of authority and pulls no punches in describing one thing that BP has done wrong.

Besides it has the phrase "Rope is not rope. It is fucking rope. All of it. Every yard of rope is fucking rope." Which reminds me of some of the better mechanics I've known.