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Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.

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    Saturday, July 26th, 2008
    reversedracula
         		1:49a
    various media
    Exit 2 is amazing! I'm so glad I imported the only English version I could find online from OCEANIA! FFIV DS would be pleasing if my party didn't get stoned in the first encounter. Muppet Treasure Island is fun. Wishmaster is fun. Lord of Illusions is fun. Darkman is ESPECIALLY fun! It's like a Batman movie where the hero is okay with letting people bite the dust. I think that is MUCH more sincere than all that passive-aggressive bullshit that Batman does.
    Friday, July 25th, 2008
    reversedracula
         		10:43p
    Sleuth remake
    Well, Michael Caine is wonderful. Jude Law is a great antagonist. Here's my favorite quip from the movie.

    "Journalists are a bunch of prickteasing cocksuckers."
    "I'm sorry, but isn't that a contradiction in terms?"

    There are some gems from the original that they kept. "So I understand you're the man who's fucking my wife." "Yes, that's right." :)

    The biggest disappointment was the removal of the kitsch stuff all over the mansion, the lack of a clown suit, and a weakened ending.

    Overall, there were enough contra-Italian insults to keep me happy.
    theferrett
         		6:52p
    My Wife
    During Clarion, I have become a choad. All I ever talk about with my wife is my stories, my writing, things that have happened while writing, whether I'm a good enough writer, is this story good enough, and maybe I can write some more.

    I know I'd want to punch me in the face.

    And yet she's still there, loving me, supporting me. It feels like a complete blessing, like great wings attached to my back. I know I'm a shallow twit now, the sort of obsessed artist who I normally mock, and I suspect that I'll be doing this for some time afterwards. My writing's suddenly become a lot harder, and a lot more psychodramatical.

    She's still there.

    I don't know why she's there, but I love her for that.
    reversedracula
         		2:15p
    six dollar VHS haul
    six dollar VHS haul:

    The Outer Limits: Children of Spider County
    The Outer Limits: Wolf 359
    The Outer Limits: Expanding Human (James Doohan)
    The Outer Limits: The Invisible Enemy (Adam West)
    Darkman
    Lord of Illusions
    What (Wet?) Dreams May Come (Cum?)
    Rushmore
    Wishmaster
    The Snows of Kilimanjaro
    Muppet Treasure Island
    Good Will Hunting
    Robocop
    Dances With Wolves
    Annie Hall

    also FFXII for $10! Huzzah!
    theferrett
         		9:39a
    A Quick Pimping
    [info]shadesong's blogathon is starting tomorrow, in which she does a post every half-hour for 24 hours to donate to the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. Click here for more details. She has auctions running, and cool flashficlets, and... oh, I'm too tired to sum up properly. It's cool, and you'll get Stuff out of it if you do, and it's for a worthy cause. So go.

    In other news, I:

    1) Need to rearrange my life when I get back so that I can spend two hours writing daily, no matter what. Eep.
    2) Need to finish critiquing six stories before breakfast.
    3) Need to write a big ol' post on this week's guest speaker, a personal hero of mine, in which I will fanboy-bukkake you all with my squee, but that takes time I do not have.
    4) Need to do more research on the Cuyahoga River. Yes, it caught fire. We in Cleveland are not thrilled to discuss that.
    reversedracula
         		1:04a
    So I'm watching Firestarter
    So Firestarter is on... "A couple who participated in a potent medical experiment gain telekinetic ability and then have a child who is pyrokinetic." It's like Stephen King doesn't even try!
    Thursday, July 24th, 2008
    theferrett
         		6:40p
    Awesome Sauce Indeed!


    From [info]sacramentalist: Rush, playing "Tom Sawyer" on Rock Band on Expert.

    God, I miss Rock Band.
    reversedracula
         		4:23p
    Wojciech Kilar
    Wojciech Kilar is amazing. I'm listening to the Ninth Gate and the Dracula soundtracks lately. They've been added to my collection. I also just ordered his Portrait of a Lady soundtrack. That's one DVD that I wish I could buy. Too bad it doesn't really exist. :( Stupid bootleg or limited print stuff. There was no legal download or Portrait of a Lady torrent so, this CD should be good. it's a mix of Wojciech Kilar's original work and some Schubert snippets. Should be fun. On an unrelated note, I think I might pick up the Lawrence of Arabia soundtrack because I want to hear the re-recording. :)

    EVERYTHING HE WRITES IS BASICALLY A BLACK MASS!
    theferrett
         		3:30p
    Unexpected Interjections
    ME, to Megan: "How's your story coming?"

    MEGAN: "Pretty good. I got seven scenes done last night. Only problem is, I still have to work on the ending."

    ME (with special sarcasm filters on): "You know what ending always works? 'And then they woke up.' Foolproof. Ends any story. Easy as pie."

    NEIL GAIMAN: "Funny, it took a lot of work for me."
    reversedracula
         		12:29p
    AMC is funny
    So I go to bed at 5AM after Red October finishes (nevermind that I have the DVD so I didn't need to stay up). Jaws 3 starts at 5AM. I consider watching it but fall asleep with the TV on. I wake up at noon and somehow catch the last minute of Jaws 3. Did they play it like three times? Now Jaws 4 is on. It's like time stood still while I slept.


    "You couldn't be stupid enough to enjoy it."

    edit: they're showing red october again... wheee

    "we're just going to keep showing US Marshalls and Hunt for Red October, and we'll show Jaws 3 like four times in a row... then Jaws 4!"
    reversedracula
         		12:24p
    because sometimes 4AM is awesome
    We had WAY too much fun last night.

    Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

    There were at least four Nazi ducks.
    Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
    reversedracula
         		2:51p
    Austrian Death Machine
    So Austrian Death Machine is an awesome thrash metal band that is Schawzenegger-centric lyrically. Pretty awesome. I've already downloaded their album. :)

    http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=79967247
    theferrett
         		11:00a
    The Best Years Of My Wife
    This is my wife.

    my wife

    She is cute.

    I miss her very much.

    I didn't realize how much I missed her until I saw a picture of her where I was not there when it was taken.

    Now she is cute and I am in San Diego and I want her cuddles very much.

    That is all.
    reversedracula
         		1:23a
    Michelangelo Buonarroti
    So I watched the Michelangelo Buonarroti biography, the Agony and the Ecstasy. It was a very moving film. It had one of the strongest depictions of love in the sense of adoration that I've encountered in an artistic medium. It's nearly an aesthetic facsimile of reading Alfarabi's "The Attainment of Happiness," which I also found very striking. It's more or less the high point of the natural law tradition, and only comes somewhat before the tipping point, Machiavelli, etc.
    Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
    reversedracula
         		4:31p
    ivy
    as an addition to ripping all of the poison ivy out of the back yard yesterday, today I decided to pull all of the Virginia creeper and English ivy off of the big tree in the back yard... yay :)
    reversedracula
         		1:28p
    auctung!
    So there's a great German translation of Anna Karenina that changes the epigram of "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, I will repay!" to "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, I play the ace!" :) I've known this for three years, but every now and then I think of it and it makes me smile.
    theferrett
         		10:04a
    Neil Gaiman, Neil Gaiman, Does Whatever A Neil Gaiman
    "So," Neil said, cup of tea in his hands. "What do you want to know?"

    It was time for the half-hour meeting you get with each of your weekly teachers at Clarion, and it was time to ask Neil the big questions. And I'd thought about this moment a lot, because each teacher had some aspect I wanted to extract from them: Kelly Link's mastery of nighttime logic and themes, Jim Kelly's story-doctoring, Mary Anne Mohanraj's comfort in dealing with other cultures. And Neil was one of the big ones.

    "Okay," I said, taking a sip of the English Breakfast he'd kindly made for me. "Sandman shouldn't have worked. It should have been just a pastiche of other worlds, with an unsympathetic protagonist to tie it all together. But it worked, and quickly, because you always found the central humanity in every character. We'd know people for three panels and we were rooting for them by the second.

    "How do you do that?"

    He considered. Neil has this Clintonian way of focusing his attention on you so that when he talks to you, it feels like you're the only person in the world he's thinking of. Your eyes water when you're around Neil, because his gaze is so direct and interested that you feel guilty blinking. And like Randall Munroe, he takes his time to form his words.

    "I read a book once," he said after a pause. "Can't remember the name of it, but that's because I put it down after eighty pages. It was written well enough, I suppose, but the lead character was someone so unlikable that I realized that if I met him at a party, I'd make my excuses after five minutes and find another room to be in.

    "So I thought, 'All my characters should be people I'd want to talk to at parties.' That's my - well, I'm just formulating it right now, but it's my Party Theory. Why would I like this person enough to spend time with them at a party I'm having a good time at? What about them would make me want to stand next to them and chat?

    "If you don't know what it is, you should find it."

    For me, that snapped it into focus so clearly. Sure, the books always tell you to find the sweet spot of your characters, but the Party Theory gives me a lens to view it very clearly and visually. I go to a lot of parties, and I spend a lot of time at those parties talking to charming assholes - wouldn't want to be their best friend, but they have some fascinating stories to entertain me for twenty minutes. And I'm very easily bored at parties, so I'd better find something where my own created beings would make me go, "Hey, that's kinda cool."

    So now, whenever I write a character, I'm going to envision them in the living room of my house. My good friends are there, Rock Band is on the TV, I have a drink of wonderful Scotch in my hand, I'm in a good mood. My lead character or my villain or a supporting character sidles up next to me. We look at each other, and feel we should say something.

    What about them is going to make me want to stay?

    (NOTE: I should add that Jim, Mary, and Kelly all had similar head-turning conversations with me about things, and I'm a little uncomfortable making it sound like this is the all-Neil channel; it's just that Jim Kelly encouraged me to blog about my Clarion experience more, and it's taken me some time to decide to do it in a more personal voice. I wish I'd transcribed more of the conversation I had with Kelly Link about active protagonists.)
    reversedracula
         		1:32a
    funny WTF emails
    these are funny WTF emails that bots send in my PSP game:

    "I found a life-size gingerbread house! I'll leave the toilet for you to eat."

    *email from eight year old kid* "Two beautiful, completely naked women that were doing a lion dance are at my house right now."

    "I'm having people through through the sperm banks for sperm containing the perfect DNA. I can't decide if I want to have a super-genius or an amazing athlete. What do you think?"
    Monday, July 21st, 2008
    theferrett
         		8:14p
    It's Time To Have A Talk, People
    Look. I enjoyed the film. Very much. I'd probably rank it a 9 or a 10 myself, if asked.

    But The Dark Knight (ranked 9.5 out of 10) should not be beating both The Godfather and Shawshank Redemption by four-tenths of a point on the IMDB top 250 films of all time.

    It's a good movie. Perfectly serviceable. It has great moments, and a lovely performance, and a tightly-written script. But the greatest movie of all time? Six-tenths of a percentage point greater than Pulp Fiction, seven-tenths better than Casablanca and Empire Strikes Back, a full point better than To Kill A Mockingbird? I say thee nay!

    Wipe the splooge off your chins, folks. I'm not trying to be a buzzkill. I think it's the best superhero movie ever, and arguably the best movie of the past ten years. Christopher Nolan is my personal directorial God. But you're going to wake up in the morning after that wild review-bender with comic book ink on your face, wondering what the fuck you were thinking, crowning this #1 EVAR. You're going to look at the dialogue in the final twenty minutes, the hoarse Batman speeches, the slow spots whenever the Joker's not on-screen and go, "Oh, crap, I did that again."

    I like it. I'd put it in the top 25 easily, maybe in the top 10... Hell, maybe even at #1. (Give me time to digest.) But greater than all other films by four-tenths? No fucking way.
    reversedracula
         		3:16p
    FFIV DS


    Hmm. Okay, I think I'll order it today, and then work furiously to get as much comp reading done in the next week, whenever the free shipping delivers it. That's plenty of incentive to work hard so I can play hard later. In August, I'll attack some sample questions with detailed outlines. If all goes according to plan, I should be able to finish my comp reading this week.

    After that, I still can't play too much FFIV DS because I'll need to re-read and review about a dozen very large books to make sure I have everything down pretty well. This includes the Ethics, the Politics, the Republic, and the Laws, as well as things from Locke, Rousseau, and Mill. This could get dicey.

    What I have to do now is read the Oresteia, some MacIntyre, some Spinoza, some Machiavelli, and then go from there.

    Today's plan is the Oresteia and the the Order of Things. I don't know how carefully I'll end up reading Defender of the Peace... hmm.
    tammypierce
         		1:00p
    The Kitten File, July 21, 2008
    Tim and I are off to the Alpha writing workshop and Confluence this week and the BLOODHOUND rewrite is finished (which is why I have to rewrite every word here--my fingers are all nice and rubbery), but before we go, I thought I should post the latest kitten update! They'll start to leave us soon as potential homes become available. Two families are lined up already, and now we have to figure out how to find three more. (No, your count is not off. Theodore, at the age of three weeks, firmly expressed her opinions on the subject, and has continued to express them very firmly to Tim and to me. She plans to stay here, and we do not get a choice. So there.) So if you know anyone in the Syracuse area who could give a loving and wonderful kitten a home, send them to us!

    Here we go with four white kittens:



    More kittens behind the cut!
    ( see more kittens )

    One last round, all together, a kitten blast!




    Current Mood: exhausted
    Current Music: "Doncha," the Pussycat Dolls
    reversedracula
         		3:25a
    thoughts
    Est ubi gloria nunc Babyloniae? Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? The earth is dancing the dance of the Macabre; at times it seems to me the Danube is crowded with ships loaded with fools going toward a dark place. All I can do now is be silent. O quam salubre, quam iucundum et suave est sedere in solitudine et tacere et loqui cum Deo!
    Sunday, July 20th, 2008
    theferrett
         		10:55p
    Concrete Wisdom
    "Ferrett," said Neil, looking up from my manuscript, "You want to watch your use of adjectives."

    "How so?"

    "You use a lot of them in a row. You should use them sparingly. It gives more effect."

    I frowned. "Can you give me an example?"

    "Absolutely." He ruffled to the first page of my story and read one of my sentences. " 'She’s so immaculately pretty, with her long tresses of honey-brown hair pulled back with a neat black ribbon, setting off her wide, slate-gray eyes.' Adjectives are like condiments; you put too many on, and they all sort of wind up as silt. I'm not saying to never use two or three in a row, but only do it when you have to use every one."

    " 'Her hair was pulled back with a black ribbon, setting off her slate-gray eyes,'" Neil said, rewriting it for me. And he was right; it was much more vivid with fewer words. And such a subtle thing that I never would have noticed my overwriting.

    Clarion's beautiful like that.
    reversedracula
         		6:39p
    I refuse to watch this movie a third time


    I've had it with the Langoliers.
    reversedracula
         		4:04p
    hmm
    I no longer want to be awake. It's too heavy.
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