ladykatza

What kind of fantasy works for you from the genre? If it helps, name some examples. - Treyvah

I had some difficulty parsing this particular request, but upon watching Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, I had a bit of an epiphany. I am fascinated by science fiction/fantasy that deals with human spirit. So much of our science fiction talks about humans creating technology to be able to do bigger and better things. But as we artificially enhance the human form, what happens to that which makes us living and sentient?

“All stories are stories of enlightenment”. It was something that my friend dreama said. In this way, I’ve found that I admire greatly the works of C.S. Friedman. I think that she is a contemporary of William Gibson, in that their flavor of science is very much influenced by current trends of technology. Where Friedman branches off, and where she is most skilled, is she takes humans and puts them in a completely alien setting. Sometimes they don’t even remember, except in ancient lore, that they were once from a place called Earth. Every series she writes is a landscape of emotion and detail, landscapes alien yet eerily familiar. She turns left when you expect a right. She tears away the masks and shows just how terrifying human emotion can be, even with all the technology we use to shield us from it.

I am not hugely into cyberpunk in novel form, but works such as the Ghost in the Shell series, and other similar anime are enjoyable.

Another thing I look for in writing is characters. Knowing what character is speaking just by what and how they say things is the mark of good characterization. Having that solid foundation of personality, the character is then the one driving the story and the situation. To paraphrase Heinlein “I don’t write the book, I write the character, throw them in a situation and let them get themselves out of it”.

Hmm, does this explain what I enjoy? To a point, I guess. I like scifi that gets you involved the the character and the alien landscape upon which they are painted. Throw in a good bit of sexiness, and I’m set.

This says a lot about me, but when I want trash romance, I read Laurel K Hamilton’s books.

Yup. I got a cold. A head cold at that, most likely caused by sinuses and allergies. Somehow I made it THIS far into the pollen season and I had hoped I’d escaped. I did not.

I’ve got four more days to go until my next day off, two 12’s and two eights. I have to make it, I need the money. Pray hope that this weekend is quiet and I can take my medicine and sit in the chair in a half comatose state.

Oh yeah, and pray the transmission isn’t going bad on my car. Please.

I’m going to be really mad if I am, in fact, coming down with a cold.

I was up too late last night. Its all the internet’s fault! OK, not really. I blame it on people I’ve been talking with, that and i needed three paragraphs of a story my husband requested before I went to bed. Simon is now home for summer vacation so I wanted to be awake this morning so help diffuse any more destruction caused by the children. They get into things. I keep finding interesting pieces of caveman art in various places around my house. Couple of them were even done in nail polish. Interesting choice of medium, location dangerous. Don’t do it again or I might blow a gasket.

Ooo, coffee’s done. MMMM, coffee.

So I’m going on a vacation! I can’t believe it, actually, because everything just fell into place. A friend of mine helped me out with the plane ticket. This was quite unexpected, but I was told to consider it a birthday present. Now Ava’s picking me up from the airport and we’re staying at her place for the night before heading out to Toronto! I finally get to meet Matthew and I’m so excited about there being a jazz festival at the same time. My mother instilled a love of Jazz and Swing in me rather early, and I remember my father teaching me basic swing moves as a kid.

But aside from that, I get to spend the week with some very awesome people and just have a really nice time. We’re going to be driving by Niagara Falls, which makes me happy. I’ll be abe to get out and gawk for at least a few minutes. This is one of the few parts of the country I haven’t driven through.

Oh yeah. Road Trips. I’m familiar with those. Growing up we had this BRIGHT orange station wagon with brown vinyl seats. It was an AMC Hornet. You don’t get much more 70’s than that, really. It had a Jeep engine in it with a straight six cylinder, so it was cheep and easy to fix with a good amount of power. Dad’s hobby was working on cars so he was always puttering with it. He also installed this awesome stereo system with a *gasp* TAPE DECK! That was the shiznit when I was growing up.

So my summer’s were spent in the back of a 70’s station wagon, driving cross country to see some relative or another. We listened to classical music, Simon and Garfunkel, Taco, and Boy George. (My Mom liked Boy George, I still find this odd) Driving along, when we weren’t a tight schedule, we often took back roads. Dad would ask gas attendants about good local restaurants in the area or something neat to see on the way. This is how we saw Carl’s Bad Caverns and numerous other oddities and roadside attractions. I still haven’t seen The World’s Largest Ball of Twine even though I’ve driven through Minnesota more times than I can count.

Later, after I was old enough to drive on my own and had my own car, I started road tripping myself. At 17, I had wanted to go back and see my friends in North Carolina (we had moved to GA just after my 16th bd), so my parents let me drive myself up there. People thought they were crazy to let a teenager do that. For me, it just seemed natural. Its only been since having kids and needing to keep a steady income that I’ve stopped doing road trips. I’ve been getting itchy foot syndrome. The travel bug bit me.

Suddenly, this drops in my lap. I had dug my feet in about it at first. I didn’t feel like I could go, like I was a bad person for taking time out for myself. Finally my husband insisted. He said “We can handle it without you for a few days, you need this.” And then it really came together.

And I’m going. I’m excited!

So, for work, I’m studying up on database languages. Namely, mysql. The intro that I am reading had the following to say:

MySQL handles databases up to 50 million rows or more. The default file size limit for a table is 4 GB (gigabytes) but can be increased to (if you have a system that can handle it) to a theoretical limit of 8 MILLION terabytes.

HOLY COW! EIGHT MILLION TERABYTES??? Do you have any idea the SIZE of that? I mean, for the most part we are talking about a completely abstract number because humans can’t THINK that large on average. I had to do some number crunching to figure it out.

Alright, take your standard digital camera and look at the info printed on it. Right now, most people are still using 5-8 megapixel cameras. On average one picture, saved in a standard JPEG format is about 1.536 megabytes. What this means is that your 1 gig memory card can hold somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 pictures.

Ok, now lets take this theoretical database and increase it to its maximum size. Then we’re going to convert the 8 million terabytes(TB) into megabytes(MB). It looks something like this:

8,000,000 TB = 8,388,608,000,000 MB

Wow, you say, that’s a lot of numbers. What does it mean, what do I care? Well, now let’s take the average file size of those pictures you take and divide it into that really really big number.

8,388,608,000,000 MB / 1.536 MB = 5,461,333,330,000 pictures stored which would be the equivalent of 9,102,222,220 cameras with 1GB chips worth of pictures.

This means that each of the 6,602,224,175 people on this planet could store 1.4 GB worth of pictures on this one server.

Has your head exploded yet?

Joc’s Request: I’d like to know your thoughts on the impact of the model on the final piece and the return gaze of the object of art.

Oh, now this is a good one. It was brought up because I have several artist friends that I have modeled/been used as a model for. The Artist Pain is probably the one that most who read this are familiar with. With him, I knew what I was getting into ahead of time, as he is a horror and fetish artist.

He was really responsible for making me look at myself in a picture and not think “oh god, that’s horrible!”. The idea that I could come out with photos that look good even though I am not “typical model” type did wonders for my self esteem. Since then, I have done several favors for other friends and was even approached by some art students at the college I went back to for a semester (before back surgery). It was… surreal.

I think how being a model and how the finish product effects you has a lot to do with who you chose to work with and what kind of work you are doing. There’s no way in hell I would ever be a fashion model, that industry is brutal. Thousands of pictures are taken, maybe five are chosen, and even then they go through and doctor them up because you just aren’t perfect enough. The pressure to be thin and perfect can kill you, literally.

However, working with artists, especially artists that are looking for that edge of something different and outside of our current beauty standard is wonderful. How you feel about the person behind the camera also helps the finished product (or how comfortable this person makes you feel).

So we’re driving back from the movie and Felicity says in her most IMPERIOUS voice “Get that sun out of my eyes!”

Daecon and I just look at each other with a great deal of mirth and he says “Well, you heard her, set already!”.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about how mopey my husband gets when I’m away. He said “How mopey is that?” and I couldn’t give him a good answer in words, so I referenced a song. “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone” by Bill Withers.

“Are you Persephone?”

It was an odd question to me, because I hadn’t thought about that Greek Myth in forever. I believe the first time I ever heard about it was from my Mother. She would talk about the story whenever Christmas came about because that’s when pomegranates were in season. It was a staple for the elaborate parties my parents would throw. One of the centerpieces was a crystal bowl full of pomegranate seeds that was back lit by candle light. This made the bowl glow with an otherworldly red quality. I imagined myself as Persephone as I ate those juicy seeds and the rain and cold outside were because someone mourned by absence.

Memories are an odd thing, because I don’t think I have the story quite right in my head and that’s not how it REALLY happened. All the images and the thoughts were there, just not sequential, so my memory ordered them in such a way to make it seem more visceral an experience.

Me: So what was the reason for the alarm and how did you fix it?
Admin: I poked something. Do you want the long story?

Of course, I thought it was hysterical.

Ava’s request - Bravery

I will start with this one, as it was the most general.

For me, being brave is the ability to swallow that lump in your throat, ignore the knot in your stomach, roll up your sleeves and do what needs doing. Sometimes bravery comes out of a desperate need to change your situation. You don’t know what you want, but you can’t her _here_ anymore. So you go. Maybe you are brave enough to take the leap into something new without outside influence. That’s often the hardest thing of all. Many people never change until forced to. Its the rare and special few that see a need to change and do so. They brave the consequences of action, take the mistakes as they come, and keep going.

Bravery, for the sake of itself, can be foolish. Are you just trying to prove something? If so, then what? Then maybe its not bravery, but recklessness.

C.S. Friedman has to be one of my favorite modern sci-fi writers. She is brilliant.

In a world where data is coin of the realm, and transmissions are guarded by no better sentinels than man-made codes and corruptible devices, there is no such thing as a secret. - This Alien Shore

In your comment, post a topic for me to blog about and I’ll attempt to write something readable about it. Topic can be absolutely anything you want (good grief, I’ll regret this). In return, post this meme on your blog, too.

I post the above because of Babylon the Bride.

“Crabs look like face huggers”

Ava came to visit this week. She has family down here and an offer to visit them worked out well. I picked her up from her cousin’s house shortly after I got out of court (court was a stupid fiasco, but more about that later). From there we drove back to my place and hung out a bit before picking daecon up and heading to J & A’s for game night. We had dinner, and played Robo Rally, and drank. I’m not sure what started it, but at one point most of us were laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe. J and I almost started hyperventilating. We eventually gave up the game, since daecon chose the wrong board to play with seven people. Also, Ava picked up right away that its good to pick on daecon. :)

Wednesday we headed downtown to Oakland Cemetery, because Ava likes to take pictures of cemeteries. It did not say so on the website at the time, but they were closed due to the tornado that hit downtown Atlanta. I was quite upset and ended up calling the number on the notice to see if there was some way we could get in for a bit. Turns out they would have to have an escort the entire time we were in there or they’d lose their FEMA reconstruction money. The lady I talked to was quite concerned, since I played up the bit about my friend having come so far and having an academic reason for wanting to see the place. They updated their website the next day. We did, however, walk around and take pictures through the gates and over the large brick wall surrounding the place. Ava taught me a LOT about symbology that I did not know before. It was fun to see how animated she became while explaining the little details to me. At one point I had climbed up on the wall to take a picture while she was holding me up by my ass. We got several honks for that, which made us giggle.

And since I had fully expected to be walking around the graveyard until after traffic, we made a detour to Little Five Points. Its the closest thing Atlanta has to a SoHo district. I spent a lot of my teenage and early 20’s there, hanging out. I still recognize a good number of people around there, homeless or otherwise. Mostly we browsed a few of the cool shops, picked up postcards, and did a great deal of people watching. Sadly, I was informed that we must steer clear of Wax N’ Facts, THE best record store in the state (real records, like, vinyl).

We went to another friend’s house for dinner, hung out and talked.

Thursday was just hanging out until later that night when we went to see “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were Dead”. Brilliant! It was quite funny. I was familiar with it in movie form, and the stage play is presented at a different pace, but still quite good. I realized that I hadn’t been there since my first date with daecon to see “Myth”.

Friday… SUSHI! yum. Lots of SUSHI! We went way overboard. Daecon and I like to go out for sushi every couple of months and go all out and having Ava there was a good excuse to splurge.

Oh, funny story. Simon had not been feeling well on Thursday so he ended up staying home from school. I had cooked lunch, and once we were done Simon wanted desert. I offered him chocolate.

“No, I want an icy-pop” he says.
“What? You don’t want chocolate?!”
“No” he says “I want an icypop”
“But chocolate is so much better.” I told him.
“Well, you just say that cause you’re a girl” he tells me.

Ava looked at me and said “That was the best answer ever. He’s wise for being so young, that one.”

We giggled about it all day.

Well, I had a most excellent week. I will write more about it most likely tomorrow.

In other news, I just found out that I have MOST of Dragon Con weekend off. I am happy!

A quick post before I actually post about my week. My friend Pain just got into a bad car wreck. His truck is totaled, and I’m really worried about him, even though he is OK. I think his girlfriend was in the car with him too. Lots of prayers and good vibes please!

After the accident.

Yup, its true. I don’t have enough bookshelves. What’s more, I don’t really have enough places to put them. Heck, I need to add an entire room on to my house just for a library. Really.

When I lived with my parents in North Carolina we had a very large two story house. The main living area was on the top floor, and then there was a walk out basement. Every inch of the basement that was not window or furniture had floor to ceiling bookshelves and they were crammed full. We had to get rid of about half of those books when we moved to Georgia, since the house was much smaller. The books got donated to the school library, who had to direct them to the public library. Science Fiction, it seems, was “inappropriate” for high school students.

Can you imagine? Mom felt sick when she heard that.

So the other week, while staying with Mom, we were commenting on some of those design-on-a-dime shows. One of the designers said “You should never have just books on your bookshelves, you need to break it up with something.” WHAT?! Oh, right. Yeah, come over to MY house and try that fer cryin’ out loud. While your at it, give me the money for that extra wing. sheesh. When I first got a job, one of my very first big purchases was a nice set of bookshelves. They cost me 70 dollars, in 1993. I still have them.

So anyway, I’m sure many of you that actually read this can sympathize with my plight of space and my reluctance to give up books.

And on that note, its time to shower and dress for work. Ta tA!

Current Mood:  geeky

Its a new-ish web comic, go check it out. Really. Come on people its hot lesbian alien chicks! And they’re pirates!

I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space

Current Mood: sleepy

My Mom got the best fortune ever at this little hole in the wall place in California. I believe I was not quite born yet. It read:

“Its after five and I’m out of ideas.”

Current Mood: sore