|mind-gloaming.net|

themes and skins and the like

Andrew Kelly — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 22:55:25 +0000

as much a note to myself as anything:
gotta get a decent plain, black but fully featured theme for this blog in the near future so I can stand to look at it.

another day

Andrew Kelly — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:48:30 +0000

…and another pin stuck into my resolve. There are times, when I don’t want to do anything, i just want to go back to sleep. I hate it when I don’t have the energy to do much of anything, to even think hard, to write or read. Luckily I’ve gotten a bit of a second wind here at around 8:30, did some writing. The last two days have been decent from a conceptual, creative standpoint, I hashed out a premise for a short story and something a bit longer yesterday and today respectively. I wrote a bit of flash fiction tonight that grew out of an idea I had a few weeks back when it merged with and twisted with this [Russian Nuclear powered lighthouses in the Arctic Circle, what if you had to be there, to watch it, and to watch it decay, to watch the platting flake off, to watch your radio malfunction, perhaps to die or to be drowned in the static of decaying particles...I'm surprised it hasn't come up at BLDGBLOG yet, which should be amended now that I've tipped him off.] The idea grew from a passage in Stross’ Glasshouse about when the protagonist get himself turned into a tank, he’s described as invisible in everything up to UV, i think. It’s a great passage and all the more interesting because of how Stross skirts the line in really telling you about the war experiences of the protagonists. It seems to me to be the best work by him, the most coherent, the most thematically focused. I recommend it highly. I still have to read Halting State. There is so much to read, almost as much to write.

overhead at work

Andrew Kelly — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 03:25:05 +0000

A: so what’s she up to?
B: Still a drunk and a whore. Last time I saw her she was lying naked on her front lawn with her pubic hair on fire.
A: How’d that happen?
B: She dropped her ciggarette I guess.

Resolved: 2009

Andrew Kelly — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 01:39:17 +0000

My new Year’s Resolutions:

Find a new job [preferably a higher paying one wiht more benefits.]
Publish here consistently
get 12 things published. [2 in the pipe with editors as of 1/2/09]
Read 52 books or ~25,000 pages.
Take more photos, a few a week at the very least, put them up here.
Take GREs, make other Graduate School Preperatoins
Attend SFRA 2009: Atlanta and present a paper (or two?) there.

I think there are ones I’m forgetting, will ammend when I recall them.

Reading 2008 in review: By the numbers

Andrew Kelly — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:02:43 +0000

I resolved last year to read 52 books in 2008. I only made it to 42 and I seem to have read a number of rather short books. This post will filter out some numbers from 2008 sp I can later design a metric for the amount of reading I’d like to be doing in 2009, reading of course of books, where magazines, highway signage, cereal boxes and magazines are given little to no consideration and are sporadic enough not to warrant it.

So, here goes:
Here’s all my numbers from 2008

first I’d like to calculate just how much reading I did, on average, per diem in 2008:

Total Pages = 13771
Average Length per Volume= 327.88 pages
Average Pages per Day= 37.73 pages

I’ve fallen short of my goal of 52 books, I’d like to see just how much, as a percentage i fell short, which we’ll call x:
[math] (42/52)=(x/100)[/math]
[math]x=80.77percent[/math]

quote of the evening:

Andrew Kelly — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 02:21:07 +0000

“That’s good thinkin’ that’s why I got through college in just 5 years.”
-Chelsea

hmm

Andrew Kelly — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:18:11 +0000

well i thought for a minute there I’d screwed over the whole old database that the old WP blog lived on, turns out I just broke some redirecting stuff for a minute. I have to figure out how to get the old blog to live quietly in a sub folder while this newer install gets the traffic from the web root index.php… hmm. not important really since no one comes here, with the exception perhaps of my father. I’m not sure writing for a not quite-invited audience of one v. writing for no one (and by default, just myself) is at all preferable, which, is a statement more on audience size, not on any particulars of the audience.

sidebar and resolutions.

Andrew Kelly — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:07:54 +0000

I’ll be putting up Record pages on the sidebar, for media I’m consuming. look for more of them to appear as the year moves on and for a roundup post on the books I read last year. I only got to 42 books last year, I’m going to figure out a page count from that, get an average number of pages per volume and then add to that number of pages proportionaly for the amount i’d like to read this year, though I will still shoot for 52 volumes, I’m ultimately more concerned with the amount I’m reading in total then the number of books.

I have an attraction these last weeks to reading big imposing books, like Stephenson’s last 4 novels, the Baroque Cycle and Anathem, which are (where the text of the novels proper close and excluding indexes and appendix, etc.) 916, 815, 887, and 890. There’s an article in Wired about Stephenson and their page numbers differ wildly from the ones I get by looking at the books, though they’re counting all forwards, indexes glossaries, etc. I’m thinking also of reading some Pynchon and maybe tackling Infinite Jest. 2009 may be the year of large novels.

I’ll put up my reading schemata once I calculate it.

People Movers

Andrew Kelly — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:27:18 +0000

The Vertical Mobility Solutions Escalator Company, based in Naples, West Virginia, is the world’s second largest supplier of moving platform and stairway conveyance equipment in the world. They are also claim to be the world’s best maintained, given that the purchase of every product comes with a lifetime inspection and safety schedule twice as often as any competitor. Maintenance and inspection work are done every 3 months, not Bi-Annually as most of the other top 5 or 6 companies do. The inspections are usually carried out by short balding men who seem to relish climbing up and into the stairways or ramps. They seem to almost bath in that odd green light beneath our feet, doing their work slowly and carefully, confounding the casual observer as to what exactly they are doing or how such an apparently complicated device seems to function.

Some had wondered about that green light, that flashes up at our soles as we are carried swiftly up and outward. It seemed bright and perhaps a little strange but then we looked upward as the stairs flattened and we continued on our way. On Christmas Day, some looked down and thought they saw a flash of movement. The following day, some looked down and know they did.

The Vertical Mobility Solutions Escalator Company sent out greeting cards, labeled “Happy Birthday, we’ll be seeing you soon!” The eggs hatched and anyone caught in the mall to return that ugly sweater or at the airport returning from a holiday was casually eaten by the hatchlings. Mall security detachments were powerless, their tasers could stop only teenage shoplifters, not reptilians. It was over as soon as it began the ships arrived and descended in turn at escalators and moving sidewalks the world over. They descended steadily on long stairs that climbed slowly down from ships, they’d come to collect on their scheduled maintenance contracts, since they’d all now come to maturity.

_
Written 12/8/2008 approx 10:15pm
Submitted to 365 Tomorrows 12/8/2008 10:51pm
Rejected by 365 Tomorrows 12/28/2008 1:26 AM

Protected: A better bookstore

Andrew Kelly — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 08:00:19 +0000