DoomBook

While I was out celebrating the holidays there were apparently some server outages at the casa resulting in the MySQL server going down. Now it should automagically come back up after the fsck on a system outage and all is well in the world.

Except for the power mains in CT apparently.

Feist is back with more novels set in his Midkemia world. Once again the Conclave of Shadows is fighting a threat to the various and sundry realms they service.

The over-arching plot in these books is fairly straightforward. There’s some evil personages, some gods, and a handful of good characters with foresight and a good view of the “bigger picture” attempting to thwart the evildoers machinations.

So the plot (although involving some well thought twists) doesn’t exactly break new ground in the Fantasy genre.

No, I think what keeps me reading Feist’s novel’s on a somewhat regular basis is that they’re just so damn well written. Each character comes off as being real rather than simply a device awaiting a certain point in the plot. Scenery is richly described. And the books chapters flow with uncanny pace . Not too quick. Not slow and grindingly mechanical.

So, the assassin’s guild is on the move with only Pug’s conclave to stand in there way. Revisit Stardock, Sorceror’s Isle, and Great Kesh in Feist’s latest work Flight of the Nighthawks.

An excellent read.

Scotts Miracle-Gro is suing a tiny company selling worm processed biological waste. The basis? Their logo uses a circle. And has colors.

I’d feel a whole lot better if I was making that up.

So TerraCycle, the sue-ee in this instance, has started up a website to let others see what they feel is a grave injustice. And frankly, if Scotts is suing based on a visible packaging similarity between their product and TerraCycle’s worm poop, it probably is.

Find out more at the supporting website.

Yea. That about sums it up. His three panel comic on how it went down is here.

Now, what bothers me here is the fact that he got fired for talking about it being hard to kill someone with a .22 rifle.

This is a conversation I’ve had before.

And oddly, the content of it wasn’t much different. Basically, the same context with a “yea, a .22 caliber rifle is great for target practice.. you’d have to really try to kill someone with it, not just accidentally misfire or something.”

I’m kinda shocked someone could mis-construe that, with the “have to shoot them in the face” added on, as being some kind of warning that you might be a psychopath. Psychopath’s *don’t* casually talk about the dangers of firearm ownership, they simply start shooting people with them.

This, folks, is why they’re psychopathic. Stating you picked out a target practice rifle based on it’s improbability of harming someone (yes, even with a colorful metaphor) shouldn’t raise any red flags here.

Is it just me, or are people starting to witch hunt because of a infinitesimally small number of deranged individuals?

So the sometime internet icon and sometimes offensive Jeffree Star (Queen of Myspace? Maybe?) was playing over at the Webster. And Miss E was running the show, so I figured on dropping by and saying hi (since I usually hang out at the coffee spot in Borders down the street after work.. and she *did* come all the way out from CA .

Right. That was fun and all. Naturally I forgot the camera -_-. No more accredited press photos for me!

Before going over though (since I remembered the name) I gave the internet a quick troll to remember who I should attach it too. And noticed there’s no Wikipedia entry for Jeffree Star.

Which is odd. There are Wikipedia entries for popular sayings (see You’re the man now, dog entry) yet no Wikipedia entry for a popular internet persona?

Yea. So. Freaky as it may seem his entries been getting more delete action than elephants and is actually banned from being added.

So apparently we can document important memes like.. ah.. you being the man. Now. But not actual people.

As the new server lurches to life (thanks to Travis’s timely visit so I could clean up the Automobile, too) I’ll be swapping this machine out with it. Doombook and co. will be running on a swank little machine with a gig and a half of ram, a modern AMD processor, and virtualization up the wazoo.

Pound will be MCing as our delegator of incoming connections, so all the nifty Ruby/Mongrel/Apache connections are transparently proxied out to whomever is requesting them.

Ideally this will all be wired up by next weekend and you’ll never notice (except the speed bump). Miracles do occasionally happen.

Strange things tend to happen with this online medium. Looking around today and following up to see if Jack L. Chalker had released anything new(ish) prior to his untimely demise I noticed that his website hadn’t been updated or even kept running smoothly after his departure.

How I found out about his bout of heart troubles and unfortunate end is also a bit odd. It was in the forward to a book on programming AJAX, one written by someone apparently influenced by the accomplished Science Fiction writer, teacher, and from all accounts good guy. But I digress.

One of the stranger things about all of this is that writings online tend to collect up like so much electronic floatsom washing up on the shore. Even if they’re not officially run by anyone sites stay up long after their authors slip the mortal coil.

Writings on forums get cataloged forever.

With all it’s various archives no antagonistic Usenet statement about someones affiliation with fascism or resemblance to mustached dictators will ever be lost. Just forgotten.

Postings about Usenet I find particularly funny, as they’re always written in the present tense. The reason that’s funny, for those of you who don’t use, don’t know about, and have no inclination of ever using Usenet news forums is that they’re all dated circa the late nineties.

And always proclaim that their subject matter, alt.fiction.literature or whatever, is still a vibrant community of writers that’s just waiting for you to drop in. There’s still people loitering on Usenet mind, it just hasn’t scaled. In fact, it appears to have shrunk quite a bit since the endless deluge of AOL users back when (see Eternal September on wikipedia).

Speaking of which the font of Cyber Punk genre fiction at the Tea Bowl mirror being maintained by Joel Benford. Ken Stone seems to have disappeared, washed under the tide of data. Or maybe just forgotten by Google. He ran Anime.net back at the dawn of time.

I’ll mirror it once again when Villa-Straylight is back online or Doombook’s main page gets cleaned up. Just to keep it from getting too dusty.

Because that’s all that happens. For a medium with such a short shelf life on “new” content it’s funny how things are starting to disappear less as the network spreads out. Although it’s freaky to see someone’s last writings lingering around with no tidy closing notice put on them.

–Fin

So, driving home Sunday I noticed a Beer Stein sitting on a recycling bin out in Wolcott. I almost stopped to pick it up.. almost. It had some odd looking attachments at the bottom that made it look like some weird Beer Stein hookah cross-bread.

And I do have a love for the bizarre accouterments. Even though I don’t smoke.

But then I got to thinking.. what if it’s a beer stein for holding ashes from some weird culture? Or maybe a stein that’s cursed to make the beer therein taste like ash.

Deciding to firmly ere on the side of beer-related caution, I drove by.

The hardware all this runs on is a hodge-podge of servers in my basement. On the one hand they’re likely to fail at any moment, system wise. On the other they’re more reliable than MySpace.

Which isn’t saying much, but still.

So I’ve invested in some decent power supplies and a new case (to replace the frame that one system is currently housed in) to keep the whole mess running for a while longer. The one bright side of the setup is the lack of dust in their current locale.

So here’s for another 8 years of villa-straylight.

I may have mentioned this before. It bears repeating.

Journalism went and offed itself at some point. I can’t exactly finger the moment it happened, but it’s definitely gone.

That’s not to say there aren’t some excellent journalistic endeavors out there. There are certainly journalists that are still journalizing and reporters that cover a story well. It’s just that they’re getting buried under an avalanche of powdery fine puff pieces of ass-kissery.

Even on NPR, supposed bastion of 24 hour news. In their case, it might be because it’s now a 24-7 news-o-rama.

Case in point. Every morning I end up listening to as much as I can stomach of a news show where they interview local politicians. Instead of any questions that come to my mind, the commentator inevitably asks a bevy of kindergarten style “and what is your job, senator.. what do you do on that hill..” inquiries. Occasionally a caller comes up with something a bit more pressing which is promptly answered with a “I haven’t looked into that yet” and let slide.

Basically it’s an excuse for politicians to push whatever platform they happen to like today at people with very little explanation.

Now don’t get me wrong. Some of those platforms are quite good, such as efforts to reintroduce criminal offenders back into society and help non-violent criminals instead of jailing them by the Connecticut justice system. But others amount to a local politicians expounding on how badly they deserve the political handout they just received from their friends. Both are treated as if equal with the same bland self serving dialog.

So maybe it’s just that there isn’t enough happening to warrant the amount of coverage, and the ever increasing amount of coverage being pushed warrants less and less real work behind it. Research discovering how today’s guest covered something sensitive up a few years back in direct opposition to the duties they’re currently taking on just doesn’t happen.