Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 63

I am at readercon

and it is awesome.  Be home (and really glad of it) tomorrow.

Run Blogging

Ran my walking route.  Planning on biking when I get home.  If I could sneak out to Miller's pond I could have a bullshit triathlon!

You know you're writing about pirates...

when you find that it's easier to just bind "fucking" to the fucking clipboard and ctrl+v every time you want to fucking say it.

Bicycle

4 miles in 30 minutes.  Eventful.  Very tough.  I am in shitty condition today for some reason.

Assorted Other Happiness

1) I FOUND A COPY OF 7 WONDERS!  It's a board game.  An awesome board game.  The Dominion of board games.

2) My doctor's office just sent me a refund check of $20 on my last visit, because they didn't need a copay.  Hey, it's exciting to me.

Submissions Don't Matter

But today Scorpius is smiling, because we are one sold poem closer to wormhole technology.  "Wolf Peach" is going to Goblin Fruit   this fall!

The fact that an ice cream truck just came by playing a chiptune version of Love is Blue is not going to spoil my mood, though I may be happily fleeing for my life from an ice cream wielding Lucy Butler in a moment or two...

G+

I am on it as me.  If I know you kind of well, I probably added you to something, but please, do not feel pressured to join me.  I am not going anywhere.  My two facebook accounts, two emails, one twitter, this LJ, all of that is still going to be around, and if you need to find me, it will not be any more difficult than it already is.

In other news

My headphones do not cancel out the sound of moral panic or armchair jurisprudence in re Casey Alexander on the other side of the bay.  It's kind of a big bay. 

And that's how we Learned a Valuable Lesson about Authorial Intent

So, if, say, you are online way past your bedtime (mentioned by way of explanation, not excuse) and someone on your Facebook posts something funny like this:
PLEASE post this as your status if you know someone who has been eaten by possums. Possums are nearly unstoppable and, when hungry, also breathe fire. 71% of people won't copy this into their status because they have already been eaten by possums, 28% are hiding in their showers with fire extinguishers awaiting the coming apossucalypse. The remaining 1% are awesome and will re-post.And you think it would be awesome to respond as if you were one of the 28% hiding in their showers with fire extinguishers, inexplicably having brought your computer with which to respond (okay, not so inexplicably.  Honestly, should the apocalypse come, I will be on the internets when it gets here, I don't know about you guys), and then you think it would be funny to use divided attention as part of the gag (i.e. partly responding on the internets and partly holding off marsupial doom with the fire extinguisher only to be cut short in the response with the classic home-line akjfdsa [fiery doom implied]) ... To wit:

I will just as soon as I can get out of the shower. Pretty good wifi in here, though, but typing means just one hand on the fire ext/asnk
Do try to be clearer about the image you are trying to convey than that.  I mean really.  It may be 2 in the goddamn morning, but still...

Also, please remember that the only thing that anyone else is going to read is "one hand" and "shower" and they will get an image you are not intending to give, which, had you not been up commenting on Facebook memes past your bedtime, you would also totally get from any combination of "one hand" and "shower" regardless of how explicit the poster was being with the location and occupation of those hands - I thought I was pretty clear that the implication would be one was typing and the other was fending off pyro-marsupial doom with a fire extingu... erm... Now that I think about it, I am sure some very optimistic man has used the term fire extinguisher for... OH CHRIST. 

The point is you can be crystal fucking clear about this and you are still going to give the same image.  Ten times out of ten.  And then you will be dependent on the good graces of someone you don't know very well to not decide you are a creep and behave accordingly.  Because you were just creepy. 

And then because YOUR BIGGEST ANXIETY TRIGGER IN THE WORLD is enacting a scene one of the scenes from Arrested Development (for which you had to leave the room, pretending to go to the bathroom... OH CHRIST) as Gob, you will panic, and have to write overlong explanations (like this one) and forget that you forgot to put gas in your car last night, leading to your gas light coming on in North Haven and flashing on the Q bridge.  And there are no gas stations in East Haven.  And you will be running into the person whose status you ruined with that image in a couple of weeks.

And there, a parable about authorial intent.

The Feral Cattiest Place on Earth

Via the 'Boing


Each night at Disneyland, after the sunburned families and exhausted cast members have made their way home, the park fills up again -- this time, with hundreds of feral cats. Park officials love the felines because they help control the mouse population. (After all, a park full of cartoon mice is more enticing than a park full of real ones.)

But these cats aren't a new addition to the Disney family. They first showed up at Disneyland shortly after it opened in 1955, and rather than spend time chasing them away, park officials decided to put the cats to work.

  
I've been kicking around the cat necromancer angle for something weird and fictional for a while, so this is like... well, catnip.