C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 70

aw man elfquest stuff :)

The Pinis are having an Elfquest collectibles sale, as they’re apparently trying to clear stuff out. They intend to run it over several weeks, adding stuff as they go.

I do not need any of their stuff to become my stuff, I said with grim determination. I don’t I don’t I don’t. Unless they come up with the red leather-bound compilation of all four of the Starblaze Donning GNs, which I saw as a teen in Bosco’s Comic Shop in Anchorage Alaska and did not, of course, have $125 for and never really...

Kitsnacks: Easy Tikka Masala

I have semi-invented an easy tikka masala recipe, which is what happens when I have a recipe I’ve made before but discover I’m missing many of the actually-called-for ingredients. This one ends up having what I trust most people have in their pantries, which is why it’s ideal. :)

Easy Tikka Masala
1-2 oz butter or vegetable oil
1 tbsp garlic powder
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp paprika
1/2-1 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp salt
pepper to taste

1 can chopped tomatoes
1 can chickpeas
1 fresh tomato, rough...

Picoreview: Fast & Furious 7

Picoreview: Fast & Furious 7: broke my heart.

I knew it was going to; the goddamn trailers were making me tear up even as I recognized that they were specifically choreographed to. I had no attachment at all to Paul Walker–I think the only thing I’ve seen him in is the F&F movies–but I was shocked by his death because, well. It was shocking. And so messed up, that he’s best known for these fast car movies and then died in a horrific car wreck. So FF7 was always going to break my heart.

And it...

Kitsnaps: Zoo Day

Yesterday it was a glorious morning and on the way to preschool Young Indiana said to me, “We should go to the zoo after school on this beautiful day!”

That seemed like a very sensible thing to do, so after school I collected him and we hopped on the bus to, er, actually, to go downtown and then get on the bus to the zoo, because that was by far the easiest way to get there, but, y’know, details details. To go to the zoo. :)

It was in fact a perfectly marvelous day, and I learned something ve...

viral!

I’ve had something go viral! I think ~160K reblogs qualifies as viral by anybody’s standards. #beams

Look, I’m dorktastic, I knew that already, but it’s kinda cool to see something get so many hits. My previous-ever best was several hundred retweets when I bitched about being able to read faster than any news video so please always just GIVE ME A TRANSCRIPT. So this is neat.

Also it makes me wish I posted more original content on Tumblr but I don’t so oh well. :)

The post viral! appeared fir...

Writing Wednesday: Discipline

@kit_flowerstorm on Twitter asks me to discuss how to practice the discipline of writing.

This is a question I get a *lot*. I don’t know if all professional writers get it a lot or if I do because I seem to have a particularly impressive output (or if it’s just that, as I actually *noticed* a few weeks ago, I work a lot).

There is not a romantic answer to this question. The truth is that when writing is your day job, you sit down and (if necessary) struggle for the words just like you might g...

Good job, Adobe.

I’ve had an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for a few years now, under the monthly subscription where you don’t pay for it the months you don’t use it, and I tend to use it about…once a month. I sort of realized today how dreadful a scam that was/how much I was paying for it, and went and bought Photoshop Elements, which has really got everything I’m realistically going to use, in order to replace the Creative Cloud subscription.

They made me talk to a customer support person when I tried t...

chd: my brain is trying to trick me

I’m suffering from a bad case of compulsive hair disorder and my brain is trying to trick me. I just saw a woman (a Topshop model, actually, featured in the image on this post) with a good layered haircut, chin-length layers around the face and blunt-cut shoulder length layers for the rest. I thought, “That looks great, I could do that!”

Except I hate layers on me. I have a great deal of hair, but it’s too straight: layers end up making it look thin and limp. (Yes, I know, that’s exactly what...

Picoreview: Seventh Son

Picoreview: Seventh Son: I can’t tell if that was subjectively bad or objectively bad.

The problem is that I’ve read the source books, but not for quite a while, and they’re a terrible adaptation of the source books but because my memory of them isn’t clear I spent a great deal of the movie going, “Wait, is that…did that…was that…okay, that’s DEFINITELY not from the books…,” which left me uncertain at the end if I’d seen your bog-standard bad fantasy film, in which case, for a bog-standard ba...

KSR at Hodges Figgis

Last night was Kim Stanley Robinson’s talk at Hodges Figgis. It went really well: the audience was full and there were a lot of great questions, almost none of which I can remember right now. :) Someone asked about ESCAPE TO KATMANDU, which I haven’t read and which apparently I must, and ANARCTICA, which is actually one of my favourite KSR novels (and turns out to be one of his favourites, too, although it evidently made no blip at all when it came out) was mentioned, and there was someone wh...