It appears that some time between the last time I used Nero and now, it has turned into a bloated, computer-hijacking piece of crap. Ergo, I do not want to buy it.

I do, however, want a program with which I can design CD labels and case inserts. There are free ones out there, but all the ones I've seen are extremely limited. I need something that will allow me reasonably full functionality from a graphical and text standpoint -- not full-scale image manipulation, since I can do that in other programs, but (at a minimum) the kind of control you'd get out of, say, MS Paint. I don't mind paying for this; I just don't want to pay for 270MB of crap I don't want in order to get the 30MB I do want.

Any recommendations?

A few drawings I've done. Tell me what you think!!!

I wrote 5,661 words today on the Silly Project.

If I kept that up for the rest of the month, I could finish NaNoWriMo in a third the time.

(This is not going to happen.)

Happy birthday, moosl

Thank you. That was ... exact.

Damn. a_d_medievalist caught me at a weak moment, and dropped five questions in my lap. So:

1. Who's the bloke in the pic?

Ah. *sighs* I don't know his name. *sighs again* He is the fallen angel Luke, on the cover of my novel Dispossession. What happened was that I told my editor I wanted to write a novel about amnesia, and a guy having to investigate his own life. She said "Does it have anything supernatural in it?" I said no, it's about amnesia. She said "Oh." I said, would you like something supernatural? She said "Yes please." I asked how she felt about angels. She said "Love 'em." Fallen angels? "Sexy."

Which I agreed with. So I wrote her a novel about amnesia and a fallen angel. And then she spent an afternoon interviewing young male models, making them take their clothes off right there in her office - and she didn't invite me to the session! Can you believe it?

2. What inspired you to set your tales in a non-Europeanish fantasy world?

Heh. It was sort of the other way around, to start with: what inspired me was meeting Tolkien, when I was twelve. So then I spent my teenage writing bad imitation Tolkien, and it wasn't until I acquired some critical judgement that I swore a great oath to write no more fantasy till I had something original to write about. Twenty years later, I read a brochure advertising a reprint of Stephen Runciman's history of the Crusades, and it was like a bolt from the blue, it was perfect. So I wrote the Outremer books, set in a fantasy Palestine where all the pre-Islamic myths are true, there really are djinn and 'ifrit and ghuls and so forth. And camels, and desert. Lots of desert.

Then I wanted to write a wet book, so it made perfect sense to move up to Istanbul and my take on the Ottoman Empire; I like to say that Selling Water by the River is an alternate-world story told in Outremer.

Aaaand then I went to Taiwan for the first time. And, yup. Not so much inspired as obsessed. Mandarin classes and all. But I had to let Daniel Fox write the books.

3. How old are the moggies?

Um. Everything's approximate (when Barry was found in the street in a Terrible State and taken to the vets, they thought he was elderly, on his last legs if not his last life; then they looked at his teeth and decided he could only be a year old at most), but Baz is about four now and Mac's about three. Unless I've missed a year. Time kinda passes me by sometimes. (I am myself L, you know.) I think they'll be five and four come the spring. Which means it's high time they settled down, he said, beetling his brows ferociously at 'em.

4. What is your favourite fish (and why?)

To cook and eat, or just generally? Assuming the former, the question is impossible. The range is vast, and so is my interest. I'm very fond of whitebait and sprats and such, fish that you cook whole and eat whole; I'm very fond of halibut, a fish so vast I've never seen a whole one. Possibly my favourite fish-cookery moment was when I walked into the fishmonger and stood there blinking for a bit, before I found my voice and asked for a pound of that and a pound of that. One was a whole swordfish, freshly flown in from the Med; the other was a basket of samphire, freshly gathered from the salt marshes of Norfolk. I went home and invented the swordfish-and-samphire stirfry (with cashews and walnut oil).

But my favourite way to eat fish is currently sushi & sashimi, so I guess my favourite fish at the moment is whatever is freshestest...

5. Desert Island Discs?

Eek. More favourites. I am so bad at this...

Individual tracks will always vary, but I need Tom Waits and I need Tom Robinson and I need Janis Ian and I need Elvis Costello. And I must have Jessye Norman singing "There's a man goin' round takin' names" (also at my funeral, please note). And I must have Bach and I must have Faure's Requiem (with a boy soprano, please) and I must have Sondheim and... Wait, how many am I allowed, again...?

And for my luxury I'd like Gore Vidal, please (yes yes, I know the rules say "nothing animate" but I don't think he'd move much, he'd just sit quietly and talk a lot - but if I can't have Gore, I'll have Radio 4, thanks), and my book has actually changed recently. It used to be The Lord of the Rings, as being inarguably my favourite book over the years if "favourite" is the one you read most often; but now I want Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Which is longer, and just as engaging, and more gobsmacking. How can one man know so much...?

Today was a strange blend of things.

We got home from San Jose yesterday afternoon and I immediately had to get caught up with all the excitement about Harlequin — which oddly, usually would mean that I was talking about a puppet. So I wound up staying up way too late to help with that.

Which meant that today I was lazing in the bathrobe, doing some sketches for a puppet gig (not involving a Harlequin) when the phone rang. It was the Portland Spirit, asking if I could come in and cover a shift. Like, right then.

Off I went to the boat and spent several hours on the water busing dishes. Exciting, yes?

Back home, I returned to drawing and now I am sad because the stuff I’m working on is cool, but it’s for a film so I can’t talk about any of it until later.  I’m not very sad, because this is fairly standard, but I just always feel dull when I have no puppetry to write about.

Comments? -- Link.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DilbertDailyStrip/~3/r0DNV46zQjE/

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-11-21/

Taking a breather from trying to come up with finish an essay on why I consider No Country for Old Men gothic, to close some browser windows.

So, then.

If this is the future of storytelling, I don’t think I mind it at all.

Also, some reading for 2010. Could come in handy, particularly if you’re thinking of doing the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge like driftwoodyak. I’m really keen on this, but I don’t think I can both read more AND write more all in the same 52-week period.

I’ve just added New Model Army and Death of the Author to my (already too-long) list. Man, I’m sick of reading boring books.

But if all that reading’s too much, maybe just skip to the end.

Last but not — well, just last — I came across the National Library’s page for A Book of Endings. Kinda cool.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

• 10:50 Just saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. #

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Yesterday I:

• made blocking wires
  
• did the finishing and blocking for a project that's been almost complete for far too long
  
• baked bread
  
• set the oven on fire

Blocking wires: 1/6" music wire from the hardware store. Burrs and edges filed off the ends; rubbed good with paraffin wax to retard rust. We'll see when I pull them out of this project, but so far, they seem not to be rusting.

Oh, and: blocking wires are AWESOMESAUCE. This is the only way I'm ever going to block anything, ever again, ever, if I get the slightest option.

Blocking: I had to block the scarf along the top of the couch. Which is just long enough, and nowhere near wide enough. (Fortunately, blocking wires plus gravity seem to be sufficient for this particular project.) We have nearly no furniture in the living room -- the couch and a rocker -- so not being able to use couch except as a chaise lounge has been, um, interesting. I seriously need some sort of blocking surface.

Bread: Okay, it's not that we've got old yeast, but a cold, drafty house. :-P I either need to rig a warming box, or I need to only do slow/cold rise breads. (Which, admittedly, have WAY BETTER FLAVOR, but still.)

Oven Fire: Yeah, don't ask. I was trying to use the oven for a warming box, had a trailing towel edge against the element, and lit the towel on fire. Opened the oven door to four-inch flames, which went to six-inch flames while I was figuring how I wanted to deal with it. Later, when grrlpup (who was around the corner in the living room) asked, "Is that smoke?" and I told her yes, that the oven had been on fire, she sounded like she didn't believe me. "But... you didn't scream."

"No," I told her. "But I rolled my eyes a lot."

(I especially rolled my eyes at the part when I moved the burning stuff to the sink, and running water on it wasn't putting it out. I take after my daddy. Maybe I shoulda been a fireman when I growed up. :-) )

Anyway, what with the fire drama, I decided I'd done with proofing the bread, and it was getting baked as is, fully proofed or not. So it's a bit, um, dense. But whatev. It's not like I didn't need a bunch of bread crumbs for Thanksgiving dinner anyway.

( In here. )

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You know, I'm not even going to review this movie. Heck, I won't even explain why I went to go see it. Sure, I had plenty of little jokes planned: Los Angeles, destroyed! Las Vegas, destroyed! Washington DC, destroyed! ...and nothing of value was lost. Well, that was one. There wasn't much to work with, really.

(Aside: Did I mention I met Sam Hamm a couple of weeks ago? Well, I did. He says he reads this blog. I was planning on addressing him personally, to ask him to take to the streets of LA with a machine gun and kill everyone he sees because 2012 was so awful.)

But really, I'm just going to say one thing. Here's how the world ends.



"This time, the neutrinos have mutated."

Under the cut are 60 brand-spankin' new Spencer Reid / Matthew Gray Gubler icons. There are lots of different styles - someting for everyone - and some funnies as well.
There are no rules. Take, share, edit, and HAVE FUN with them. Credit isn't necessary. I love feedback, if you're not too busy. :]

Teasers:

And the Internets said unto the woman, what is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, the telophase beguiled me, and I did make this lolcat.

Despite the fact that that is so not the sort of thing I do. But here we all are anyway.

I forgot how awesome the three shapechanging masters from Shikoku look in their old human dude forms! XD I don't know why I can't find any good images of them online...

36,220 words, worked, ate Chinese soup, watched Rachel Maddow, read a little in "Republican Gomorrah"

There is a stray dog in the neighborhood, the Boyz are on high alert. woof woof.

(Posted here for reference. At twitter, I'm "yeff")

• 06:06 Up, and Writing. Revising, actually, but the technology is similar... #fb #
• 15:05 I sure love the Indian Food Buffet but something in it isn't loving me right now... #fb #
• 15:06 RT @CERN Whoops. Just destroyed the universe. Sorry 'bout that! kthxbye #LHC #CERN #fb #
• 16:30 @ShineAnthology It wasn't difficult to eat. No, not at all. And I think the problem might have been the kidney bean dish (name forgotten) #
• 16:33 @BrentSpiner Heck, if Ty Cobb can be in the HOF, why can't Pete? The things Ty did to goats while drunk? You don't want to know... #
• 16:49 Dear Computer Copying Files: At 1.5 GB, you said 58 mins; 750 MB, 10 mins; 300 MB, 3 mins; 80 MB, 2 mins, 20 sec. What The Hey? #fb #
• 17:33 And just why is the copy speed getting slower, and slower, and slower? This stinks #fb #
• 20:23 Fri eve puzzles: jumble = 0:40; nyt xword = 23:16 (NO lookups!!!) #fb #
• 20:50 why is my home wireless so full of Teh Slow? time to reboot the router. #fb #
• 21:04 The Sacramento Monarchs folded, dang it. www.wnba.com/monarchs/monarchs_091120.html #fb #

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