In Which I Stand Up To Be Counted.

To: games.comments@vugames.com
Subject: Of dogs and mangers.

Dear Vivendi Universal Games,

Are you familiar with the story of the dog in the manger? Wikipedia describes it thusly:

The Dog in the Manger is a fable attributed to Aesop, concerning a dog who ferociously kept the cattle in the farm from eating the stored grains and vegetables, even though he was unable to eat them himself, leading an ox to mutter the moral of the fable: People often grudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves.

By putting the kibosh on the free fan production of King's Quest IX, your company is playing the role of dog in the manger. You aren't using the property, but you are nonetheless preventing others from using it. This benefits no one, least of all you.

As I see it, there are two ways you can bail yourself out of this PR disaster: a) retract your demands and allow the fans to release their little free fan-game, or b) incorporate it into the official game franchise, as its makers are willing to allow you to do.

In other words, get out of the manger, or start selling the ox chow.

Otherwise, you're going to have an awful lot of avid gamers avoiding any product that says "VU Games" on the box.

Sincerely,
L.

In Which Pale Is The New Black.

The guitars in this song are so infectious.... whatever metaphorical disease they may be, I am totally down with it.

It comes from an otherwise fairly bad compilation I got a while back. I listened to it once, decided I'd been charged too much for it [Note: it was free], and didn't play it again until I decided to get rid of it recently. Of course, I couldn't do that without first checking to see if I missed anything listenable. Good thing I did.

The band was known as The Pale at the time the compilation was released, but has since changed its name to The Pale Pacific. Rolling Stone describes them as emo. Whatever, dude. If you dig it too, there are more tracks to download at sidecho.com.

In Which I Elaborate Further (And Further) Upon My Weekend.

The Underground Tour was a bust. I called ahead to reserve tickets, was informed that no reservations were allowed, and then arrived on time -- but they were sold out.

Fine! I didn't want to go on your stupid tour anyway! ...Piri and I wandered through an adjacent antique mall, bought some discounted silverware, and visited an incredible toy store which sold a lot of things we remembered fondly from our far-off youth, as well as many new toys nobody has ever heard of before. One toy, a softball-sized plastic sphere with a random motor inside, was allowed to run wild about the room, and kept startling me by banging up against my heels. For auld lang syne, I picked up one of these. It is sprouting in my kitchen at this moment. In fact, I feel the sudden urge to go check on it....

Hmm, no foliage yet. Anyway, our next destination was the Globe Cafe, where In Gowan Ring was performing. But first, Seattle had to have its way with us. Neither of us have any real sense of direction, and both were already weary, and we therefore spent the next couple of hours taking wrong turns, driving for miles looking for a place to turn around, and trying to remember why we ever wanted to return to this city which was apparently designed by a kitten with a ball of yarn. No trip to Seattle would be complete without such an episode. (Okay, actually it would. But if I pretend I enjoy it hard enough, maybe someday this wretched city will not allow me to get lost, just to spite me.)

In Gowan Ring is some guy with a name nobody knows how to pronounce, who plays acoustic songs about fallen leaves and the way moonlight reflects on the sea. His music is folk in the old British sense (folke?). His lyrics feature antique grammar and arcane wordplay, and are poetic in the Wordsworthian tradition. His following is apparently small (there were less than 30 people in attendance) but fervent. He played quite a long set, most of which would make nice napping music. I refrained from napping, though my mind wandered quite a bit. The highlight of the evening, for me, had already happened: throat singing.

The opening band, Novemthree, featured a friend of Piri's named Pythagumus Toadstool. (No, really.) Two guys accompanied him, one with hand drums and a cute scarf, the other with piano/recorder/vocals. On their last song, the latter, an unremarkable-looking white chap, started emitting this buzzing harmonic drone. He was able to modulate each of the pitches independently (I could only hear two, but there might have been more). Now, I've seen Genghis Blues, I've heard recordings by Yat-Kha and Huun-Huur-Tu, but I'd never actually witnessed live throat singing before. It was wiggidy-wack. I am putting it on my list of things to learn how to do (right between tai chi and reefing a sail).

And it could come in handy. After my semi-successful recording experiments today, Piri invited me to join her new band, Arrowwood. I am in a band! Awesome. Never mind that we live two hours apart and are unlikely to ever get up the courage to perform live. We have a band. Move over, Gary Benchley. Fame and fortune are surely just around the corner.

In Which I Desire Expensive Electronic Equipment.

Piri has been recording music and allowed (i.e, goaded) me to use her 4-track recorder. It is a BOSS BR-532, if that means anything to you. I had never really been forced (at gunpoint) to use one before, but it was a fascinating experience. I thought I was going to add some instrumentation or sound effects to something she was already working on, but no, she left me alone with it and said, "Okay, record a song!" Wow. Anyway, I recorded a brief experiment which I titled "Clumsy Dance," and then we collaborated on "Sub Umbra Alarum," a piece with lyrics pulled at random from the Latin Psalter.

I know, they're both pretty rough... but I could definitely get addicted to this.

In Which I Am a Comedy of Errors.

So last night my sister calls, and I discover that my new cordless phone isn't working. But the cordless is the only phone upstairs, and I'm working on a project up there involving lots of little pieces I don't want to move. So, leaving my sister waiting on the line, I bring up another phone from downstairs and plug it into the jack I normally use for the cordless.

The phone from downstairs is a beautiful old red rotary. I love it, but the cord isn't very long, and the heavy receiver keeps slipping out from between my ear and shoulder. This is not conducive to projects involving scissors, paper, and glue. After about a half-hour of chatting, I decide that the cordless was probably just seated wrong in the cradle and needed some time to recharge. Maybe it's even recharged by now. I pick it up and press TALK. The phone doesn't die immediately, so I give it a "Hello? Hello?"

Silence. "I guess it's still not working," I tell my sister, via the other receiver.

"No, I could hear you," she says.

"Uh, I think that's because I still had this phone kinda close to my face. Here, I'll cover up the mouthpiece." I cup my hand over it, then hit TALK again on the cordless. "Hello? Hello?" Returning to the red phone, I ask, "How about then? Could you hear me then?"

"Nope."

"See? Not working."

Hours later, when I take the red phone back downstairs, I realize that the cordless could possibly have failed the "Hello" tests because it wasn't plugged into the phone jack anymore.

In Which Lazy Writers Everywhere Rejoice.

Defective Yeti spoofs NaNoWriMo and invents a new fiction fad all in one go: WriAShorStorWe.

As a bonus, he throws in a pointer on how to keep specified web pages from being indexed by search engines. Neat!

In Which I Consider the Virtues of Research.

There's no way I'll feel ready to start my NaNo novel on November 1st. But there are a few things I can do to get a little closer. One is the ever-elusive plot outline, which may or may not actually materialize (if I can pin down my major conflict by the end of this week, I'll be happy). The other is research.

Of course, the speed-novelist's best friend is Wikipedia, and I'll certainly be calling on it in the near future. My other online helpers this year include the Encyclopedia Mythica and undercity.org.

But there's another kind of research, and it involves collecting experience instead of data. To this end, I'm trying to work an Underground Tour into next weekend's Seattle road trip (after many people told me how cool it is). I also aim to somehow get onto the roof of the Wells Fargo Center, preferably at night.... Let's hope the magic phrase "I'm writing a novel" will be my "Open, Sesame!"

In Which I Appreciate the Little Things.

Man, tinkering with HTML is so fun. I get a buzz from figuring out the tiniest little thing, like how to remove that stupid blue border around a linked image. I know smart people use editing software, but I'm still infatuated with the nuts and bolts of it (even though I've forgotten most of the code I learned in the '90s, so I have to learn things like the above all over again).

Naturally, I'm tempted to mash up this prefab Blogger page so it doesn't look exactly like everyone else's. But now is not the time, I keep telling myself. Now is not the time. November looms.

In other news, I'm having second thoughts about my decision to wear purple herringbone tights with a green skirt today.

Post the First: In Which I Enumerate the Ways This Blog Will Improve My Life

1. People who blog are cool. At least, all the ones I know are. I suspect that even bloggers who aren’t cool, if any such exist, are still cooler than they would be if they didn’t blog.
Little-known fact: I have always aspired to some degree of coolness.

2. As a writer who wants to be a published writer, I can develop my blog into something that provides me with a) creative outlet, b) an audience, and c) increased exposure. SWEET!

3. Blogs foster something known as “parasocial interaction”, which sounds a little like parasailing, which my aunt tried once and she said it was really fun.

4. I will neutralize any potential negative side effects of blogging by a) refraining from any discussion of my employer and b) avoiding the use of real names, except when discussing Famous People, such as myself. Note: this last part will be extra fun, like writing in code or something.

5. I never could keep up a journal (except once, when a course grade depended on it). But when I think about the past, I always wonder what cool things I did and said that I’ve forgotten about. Now the events of my life will be archived on the internet, neatly categorized and fully searchable. I AM KILLING SO MANY BIRDS WITH THIS STONE, IT’S RIDICULOUS.