Vocabulary Building Serial Novel

For previous chapters, look for the label GRE

Shelia and I got into JK’s dune buggy. “My henchmen found this in the middle of the desert.” JK said. “I don’t suppose you had anything to do with that?”
I tried to smile urbanely. “Darling, it’s unlike you to have an evening talking shop when it’s time for a cocktail.”
JK smiled a favonian smile. “You’re quite right.” she said as she piloted the dune buggy around the back of a high dune to an empty hinterland. The shadow of the sun made the valley dark. It was devoid of life, except for a shack. Not even tumbleweeds blew in the strong west wind that gusted around us. “You’ll have to excuse my error in punctiilio.” She halted the buggy in front of the shack. “Would you like to come in for a drink?”
“But of course.” I exited the buggy, hoping that a shared drink with a former lover (or so she thought) would lead to some sort of exegesis. “Do you have any Armagnac?”
“No, Jane Smith, I do not.” JK said, her revolver aimed directly at me.
My eyes widened, but I tried to maintain equanimity. “I was hoping to wassail our reunion.”
“You must think I’m an ignoramus. You think I wouldn’t recognize my own lover?” She waved her gun, gesturing that we should enter the shack. “And who goes to a shack and asks for Armagnac? You’re a fool, Jane Smith.”
The wind howled through gaps in shack’s walls. It was a hastily constructed bricolage of wood from broken shipping pallets and other scrap lumber. Some overturned buckets served as chairs. “Sit there.” JK commanded.
Shelia and I did as instructed.
“Jane Smith, either you think I have no acuity or you let Shelia do all the thinking for you. Given that she tried to signal you to shut up three times during our drive, I can only assume the latter.” JK reached into her purse and removed a brandy snifter and a very small bottle of Armagnac and poured herself a drink.
I knew you’d have that!” I exclaimed before thinking.
“But I never share.” She swirled the amber beverage in her glass. “Let’s say for a moment that my goal now is irenic.”
“Then why are you pointing a gun at us?” Shelia asked.
JK shrugged. “I could efface you from earth right now with a flick of my index finger. You’ll just have to take my word for this.” JK sipped at her Armagnac. “It’s not you that I’m after. I want Dr. Cool.”
“Then why are you holding us here?” I demanded.
“Bait.” JK said, standing up.
“What’s all this about?” Shelia asked.
JK sighed. “An interregnum. We have a power vacuum and like dust mites, you two have been sucked into it. No fault of your own, of course. In a certain sense, though, absolutely everyone is a victim of circumstance. You, me, Dr. Cool, Milligan Peg . . ..”
“Milligan Peg is dead.” I said.
“Yes I know.” JK laughed to herself. “I pulled the trigger.” Her blood red lips formed a semblance of a smile. “I’ll have to leave you two here now. No running off.” She walked through the door, shutting it behind her. I started to go after her, but Shelia stopped me. The buggy started up outside and roared away.
“It’s best if we wait for Dr. Cool.” Shelia explained.
The cold wind blew harder through the shack as the sun went down.
A nascent understanding formed in my mind.

In which I blather about my dog

Xena was acting very strangely and alarming me this morning, but after her walk, she seems fine. She was twitching with every breath and not getting up for her spot on the carpet. ack. but I took her for a walk down to the statue of the kid with the mushrooms and she perked right back up and came in and had food and water. She is funny in the morning, because she knows she has to wait for me to do my routine before she gets walked, so she doesn’t want to rouse herself too much, lest she awaken her bladder. I had forgotten though and thought something was terribly wrong, but I went through my routine anyway. heh. The dog is smarter than me.

She seems kind of sad. I am going to see if she’s allowed in the café from which I buy espresso. There is no food in the house and it’s filthy. I’m guessing that she’s not allowed in the store. I will do much cleaning before Cola returns.

And . . . she is indeed allowed in the café. Also, Dutch for “Sit!” is “Zit!” which caused the café guy to ask if she was a Dutch dog. I wish they all could be California dogs. She’s fine after a walk, but the longer she sits indoors, the more twitchy she gets. I thought she was having nightmares yesterday, but she was awake. Yikes. I guess we go for a walk whenever she starts to twitch and shake. Poor dog. She went more than 12 hours without getting to pee and she didn’t drink any of her water in the crate, she just let it drip on her, so it was like 12 hours of thirst and water torture. I hope she is ok. I haven’t tried leaving her alone yet, but I must go buy food.

In the lowlands

Xena and I have arrived. After spending several hours in a little crate, Xena was very happy to get a walk. As far as I can tell, she drank no water while in transport. When she got back to my place, she drank a few litres and then fell asleep.

Carrying a big heavy suitcase, a dog and a dog crate on the train is a bit of a chore. When I got to the station in Den Haag, none of the taxis wanted to take me because of Xena. Finally one agreed, as long as certain conditions were met, including the dog staying off the seats. It’s hard to explain to a freaked out dog that the normal rules of car travel don’t apply.
My street is a pedestrian street, so after the cab dropped me off, I still had to walk with crazy dog and stuff. It was ok though. We went for a walk and Xena already recognizes the apartment. She’s smart.
Nicole cried at the airport when Xena was carted away in a cage to go into the baggage hold. It’s weird, but it makes me feel better when Cola cries. For two reasons. One is that if I’m stressed about something and she cries about it, then I feel validated. Yes, checking a dog into cargo is alarming. The other is that when I reassure her, I say reassuring things and internalize them, thus reassuring myself. Also, it kinda makes me feel all butch and stuff.
Yay, I’m here. Oh my god, my head hurts. It’s 3:00 pm now. How much longer should I force myself to stay awake? I’d be jealous of the dog for being asleep, but she’s having nightmares.

Resolutions

Virtual Disco It’s that time again, where I make resolutions. Last year, my results were a mixed bag.

I did not develop any sort of calm, see any heads of St. John the Baptist, go to any Armagnac tasting or take any bike trips. I did, however, get much better at French, play a couple gigs in France, write a bit of music and get better about keeping track of dates.
In 2007, I will:

  • Accept myself
  • Get serenity
  • write more music
  • play more gigs
  • Bring the sexy back (see accompanying picture)
  • floss my teeth every day

2006

Here is an unexplained list of events in 2006 that effected my life, in no particular order:

  • 2 gigs in France (well, 3, sorta)
  • students riot in paris
  • Vélorution (French Critical Mass)
  • Lyme Disease
  • Went to Tours, Nice, Orléans Joan of Arc Festival
  • Went to Munich, Karlsruhe, Berlin and Cologne
  • 4 gigs (2 on tuba) in California
  • Dutch Radio play
  • 1 gig in Holland
  • Brother got married
  • got my dog back
  • Moved from Paris, France to The Hague, the Netherlands
  • Started at the Royal Conservatory of the Netherlands (became a snob)
  • Went to Brussels, many trips to Amsterdam and other Dutch cities
  • Zoloft
  • 60×60 Pacific rim Mix
  • anti-squatting
  • Best! Bike! In! The! World!

Virtual Installations

Les Hudson
I’ve spent much of today trying to figure out how to do make virtual sound installations in Second Life. From what I’ve seen for sale, it’s probably possible. But SL is not a sharing sort of community. It’s more of a capitalist system. If you want to upload stuff, you’ve got to have the Lindens (10$L / file). If you want land, you need Lindens. So you can get them by sacrificing real money or you can make stuff in SL to sell (but it will cost you to upload the raw materials, so you have to recover your costs) or you can get a virtual job.

there’s no better way to relax from spending all day staring at a computer screen at work than to come home and stare at a computer screen doing my second virtual shift for (semi-real) play money. No wonder the IRS wants to tax this game. No wonder the NYT and other papers are happily wildly inflating the numbers of regular users. No wonder corporations are busily putting up ads. They love this. It’s a model they get. Money buys stuff. There’s no weird “sharing” or other hard-to-grok economies. People sell stuff to each other and so rich folks and corporations get all the cool stuff because they can invest in finding and paying people to create it for them. Second Life is a lot like Real Life.
I think it is on the upswing and will continue to grow, but probably without me. I would have put in the effort to photograph my favorite shirt to upload it as a texture map for my avatar to wear (in human speak: I was taking pictures of my shirt so my player could wear it), but I’m not going to pay for the privilege of generating content on a private network. I’m not opposed to paying for things. I pay for flickr. Because my free account had upload limits that I wanted to exceed. I wanted to exceed them because of positive experiences I had after I uploaded some stuff without paying. First I got positive feedback, then I gave out some money. The new economy is not dead. First, prove to me that you’ve got something worthwhile, then offer me more if I pay you. It’s a good model.

My Avatar isn’t wearing underwear


I joined Second Life recently. I have a sort of a fascination with VR environments. I used to run a MOO (like a MUD but object-oriented). I wrote about a bajillion objects for the MOO. Unfortunately, most of my objects cannot be ported to the visual world of SL because they violate the TOS. Alas.

Anyway, about 3 years ago I did a sound project associated with the MOO. I have the idea that I could do virtual installations. SL has about 100K active members, so it’s not a large potential audience, really. But I think it’s got legs. I joined after reading an article about copyright issues in the Washington Post. I don’t know if this means SL has jumped the shark or if it has just broken into the mainstream.
It’s funny how just wearing such a goofy outfit virtually makes me kind of uncomfortable. Back into normal pants (and no wings) right after the screen grab. I’m so uptight. I can’t let my inner-gay shine through. alas
In other news, work is afoot to turn the wiimote into a general HID for things like gameplay use. That would allow me to practice using it and play a game at the same time. w00t. There’s also plans underway to make it play nicely with SuperCollider. I’m all over that.
To my non-american readers: I’m sorry about the insane amount of idiom. I’m like a 19 year old Canadian coming home from the US and getting drunk.

Glossay

VR Virtual Reality
MUD Multi User Demon – a text based virtual reality simulation. It allowed the users to modify the environment.
TOS Terms of Service – an agreement that I have to follow
jump the shark pass the high point of it’s popularity. Something keeps getting cooler and cooler until it jumps the shark and then is embarrassingly not cool.
wiimote new kind of remote control / joystick for the new nintendo game system
HID Human Interface Device – a joystick or silimar
w00t hooray! yay! super! wow! a happy noise. only sort of cynical at the same time.
all over that in favor of

Planned Obsolescence

Ok, Apple Computer makes great products that are plug and play. Provided that everything is all the same age. For example, if you have one of the first generation Apple-branded flat screen monitors, you cannot plug it into a Mac mini. The pin assignment and whatnot of the plug have not changed. But the size of the plug has changed. The Apple stores don’t sell adaptors.

Maybe Apple resellers sell an adaptor, but that’s hard to know since apple intentionally bankrupted most of them. It’s worth noting here, as an aside, that the VGA plug has not changed since it was introduced. While your 1999 Apple monitor is “too old,” you 1985 VGA monitor will still work fine with any VGA-equipped computer.
It’s time to stop pretending that Apple is somehow the high road. They do every Microsoft-like trick they can get away with. The only reason their products are better is because they’re trying to catch up in market share. If they achieved the position of dominance that Microsoft has, they would start selling crap products too.
For desktop computers, I’m switching to linux from now on. I have to build half the tools that I use anyway. It would only be slightly more work to build the whole system and at least then I would have the latest version of everything instead of waiting for the fink port.

Edit

Ok, the reason the plug changed is because Apple decided to switch from their own standard to an industry standard, which is an idea that I support. However, it’s still true that their own stores don’t carry the $100 adaptors and that all the best resellers are dead. And that their so-called geniuses don’t tell you jack about what’s up with changing plug sizes. Also, if you want to add RAM to a Mac mini, you’re going to be shelling out for an hour of labor. Ouch. Order it with the ram, don’t plan to upgrade.