Closing in on the End? Light at the End of the Tunnel? Maybe?

Working on my big project! Around nine and a half hours when I chopped my rough draft together! That's why, though I've been doing at least a post a month this year here, I didn't have time to do one last month!

I watched through my rough cut, the entire thing, two weeks ago, and took many days' (pages') worth of notes in my At-a-Glance over it. Now my pages are blank again with new notes ready to be taken; the notes lasted up through yesterday, and I've been chugging through tightening up where I said it needed it, and adjusting the audio levels where I said, adding clips I said to where they needed to go. 

Today happens to mark the 1,000th day of my Duolingo streak, and did you know that I've gotten every gem available in the daily Woodoku challenge ever since I started doing Woodoku, and today would also mark my final gem for the month of May 2023. You know what, I've got streak freezes enabled, and four more days left in the month to get that final daily challenge... Let's say that I skip both of those for the day, and when I do them tomorrow that's going to mark when I stop with the editing and do a second watchthrough. 

I also have a couple of friends whose opinions I value on a lot of the stuff I have to talk about, looking over my script right now; it's a time commitment to even do that but, they should have enough time, and, hopefully I'll be able to add their feedback as well, somehow... It's getting pretty late in the game, but if my video is too boring or nonsensical for an outside audience it'll be for naught anyway.

Disappointed. Don't Have Much Unique to Say. But I am Disappointed. (Hachette v. Internet Archive Stuff.)

So a month ago today I posted a post wherein I accessed a book from the Internet Archive; since I already posted something this month I hadn't been going to do so again until Saturday at the earliest (i.e. next month), but I was reading through last month's post and I realized the court decision that was handed down last week really affected like, the very medium by which I'd accessed Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, and really felt like I needed to say something. Like for one, the image I use on that post is a link hosted by archive.org and I'm not sure it's still gonna be there for long? It's part of the first free few pages accessible without logging in, I don't know exactly what the plan is, although I do know that the Archive are going to appeal the decision.

There are going to be massive repercussions all dang over. It was a fascinating case I was following closely, I saw both sides' points but I knew how I really really wanted it to end.... I'm sick and tired of these court cases being decided the wrong way; notably it's the publishers and not the authors themselves that were suing IA. 

If the copies of the books existed in the metaverse then maybe the case would have gone differently! Which is absolutely ridiculous! (Caught yesterday's Folding Ideas video on Decentraland within 20 minutes of it premiering: the metaverse is just the internet only virtual reality so that it can be a metaverse instead of the internet; that's the only difference.) 

Keeping this in mind gives us the tools to track the principle going from a physical library to a virtual library, and then from a virtual library to an even more virtual one: scans that can only be accessed once at a time. The lawyers managed to argue that this somehow represents a misunderstanding of how ownership works when dealing with intellectual property- the physical library loans out ebooks, but straight from the publisher, mediated by the extra step of a physical form (that is the physical library.) The Internet Archive library takes away that physical step and substitutes it for a different one: instead of representing direct beamed-to-the-libraries-from-the-publishers ebooks, the ebooks represent physical books owned by the Archive themselves and accessible without need of access to the physical library.

The court argued that the Internet Archive wasn't operating under fair use because their lending out ebooks is nontransformative- I really need people to move past fair use arguments here, because it misses the point entirely. VidAngel argued fair use when they made transformative (censored, etc) copies of copyrighted material, under much the same virtual-access-of-physical-media model that archive.org employs; I think they were missing the point there, and they of all people have much greater stake to making the transformative argument as a claim; they were also denied in court, which also sucks and is especially why it's a bad argument when dealing with this specific issue. Precedents, and all.

Getting a book from your own bookshelf isn't fair use, though. Getting a book from someone else's bookshelf either. Fair use is about fairly claiming copyright of someone else's copyright, and... well there's that word, "copy" right. The extra step there, that I was talking about up there, the mediating step of the copyrighted material being digitalized, that does represent a copy, doesn't it. You can screenshot a page from the internet archive, but that's on your end, no different from photocopying a page from a library book except for whether it exists in a physical or virtual environment. It isn't about the loaning of the ebooks, it's about having created them in the first place- or rather, it's about doing both, as surely photocopying a book you yourself own for your own personal use does fall under that nasty fair use goblin. You can lend a friend a book, you can bury that book and lend a friend your photocopy, is there a difference there, and if not, what's the difference in changing the medium to a virtual medium instead of a physical? The precise location where the "fair use" would fall shifts as the terms shift; somehow, it's not a true Ship of Theseus.

I don't know; it feels like I'm talking around it now. Fascinating on a philosophical level though! You can see why I was so keen on the case, and also why I'm so disappointed by the New York courts' siding with the publishers on this one, because it takes this complex issue and flattens it into a simple case of somebody using a, song or whatever, non-transformatively without permission. Disappointed. I didn't have much unique to say, I don't think. But I am disappointed.

(Imperf)Ec(ti)o(n) Made This World

Finished Six Walks in the Fictional Woods today. I did not know that Eco was born in Alessandria, Piedmont; perhaps our ancestors knew one another? Nor did I see the breakdown of the material history of the text of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion coming. 

So we need a sequel to my last post because, I did some light editing after publishing it (my m.o. by this point) and I realized there was an entire section of text that I went over today, which I knew about when I published the last post but forgot to engage with, even though it was perfect for what I was talking about-- imperfection.

Why does a movie become a cult movie? Why does a novel or a poem become a cult book? Some time ago, while trying to explain why Casablanca has become a cult movie, I proposed the hypothesis that one factor contributing to the development of a cult around a particular work is the "disjointedness" of the work.

I'd already scouted the passage because of how perfect it is for the Very Ongoing Project (VOP?) but, uh, it also tied into the themes of, imperfection, that I'd been writing about in last post...

Also I only realized the next day, why was Eco's name the thing in brackets, and not the rest of it? Eco isn't the afterthought there. Corrected in the name of this post.

Imperf(ec)ti(o)n Made This World

Twenty-eight years ago someone named Jim received a copy of Umberto Eco's Six Walks in the Fictional Woods for one of his birthdays; first edition, third printing. At some point later, sponsored by the Arcadia Fund with contributions from the Internet Archive, station09.cebu digitized this copy of the book using a Sony Alpha-A6300 and uploaded it to archive.org on October 8th 2020, upload completing and the digitized copy being fully accessible, gifted to everyone 25 years 10 months and 14 days after being gifted to Jim. Most other details are speculative. How old Jim was when he received the birthday book, somebody out there possibly knows but is non-deducible from the bookplate inscription alone; the path the book took after leaving Jim's collection and when, whether Jim even read the book and enjoyed the creative adventure that really is part of that book.

Tuesday August 16th of last year I'm listening to the podcast Homestuck Made This World where they briefly invoke something Umberto Eco says in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, that text is a lazy machine that requires the reader to do much of its work for it. I had already looked into Six Walks in the Fictional Woods after having watched Kyle Kallgren's video essay on Umberto Eco a couple of months before, June 8th the day it had come out- as I recall, I caught as much of it as I could as it premiered on my lunch break, but the premiere extended a little past when it was time to go back to work so I had to pause and finish the last few minutes of it afterward. At work that day, I had begun the audiobook of Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman and read by J. Paul Boehmer and Coleen Marlo; and had listened to the entirety of U2's Achtung Baby!, an album which came out three years, one week, and one day before the day Jim received a published volume of Umberto Eco lectures, an album which came out two days before I was born. After work, I watched the first episode of Ms. Marvel, finished off a viewing of Kung Fu Panda 2 I had begun a couple of days before, and watched the third episode of each of FLCL, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

I watched the behind-the-scenes documentary of the making of The Last Jedi today, The Director and the Jedi, and a shot of their location shooting in Ireland reminded me briefly of Barry Levinson's 1992 magnum opus Toys, which I'm only bringing up because, flipping through my notes, I would watch that film that Saturday?

I'd looked into Six Walks in the Fictional Woods around that time, and for some reason it had dropped off my radar until today even though it still had relevance to the very ongoing project for which I watched The Director and the Jedi today (it's, both the very project, which is ongoing, and, a project which is very ongoing.) I'd recently been trying to remember the conversation that Cameron and Michael had had where they'd invoked the sieve-like nature of text, the fact that narrative can't get infinitely detailed so thus will always be at least partially ambiguous; I remembered a specific detail about the conversation yesterday, the idea you never see Gandalf out shopping even though he must, and that afforded me enough grist to ask about it on the Homestuck Made This World discord server, where I could receive a reply pointing me accurately toward the specific episode. Took less than ten minutes. Listening through the episode this morning, finding the philosophical apparatus they used (Eco!), tracking down the citation at lunch. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. It was then that I remembered I'd been looking into the book in the first place.

Also, at lunch on the computer-- browsing twitter a little bit, Robert Evans @IwriteOK who hosts one of the podcasts on my regular listen-to-at-work rotation, is the citational provenance for this part-- Austin Kleon, he of the Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work! books that were lent to me unsolicited by one of my artist-friends-who-happens-to-also-be-one-of-my-professors at college and which I so dug, had tweeted about the quasi-nightmarish vague dystopia of the implications of one of Google's newest features.

Kleon writes that one of the most interesting parts of old photographs is the tiny imperfections in them, the ephemera that clogs up the backgrounds and pins the photographs down to specific places and times and things we wouldn't question to question. He writes that that's why he keeps the detailed records he does of the small mundane things, the crap and crud and junk, the TV watched and the meetings attended: it's because of my own, similar records that I've kept daily for eight years now that I can tell you the specifics about the day I was introduced to Six Walks in the Fictional Woods.

Imperfect your memories - Austin Kleon

And that brings it back full circle I think- the seeming imperfections, like the handwritten birthday dedication kept at the front page of a book from a stranger, that tells you that this particular volume, and thus perhaps every volume, has a story, and those stories fit together in a chain of other stories that it's impossible to explicate every meaning of, that we could try to smooth away the seeming imperfections but that would erase the humanity of our memories. 

I don't know. As the very ongoing project continues, I become more aware that I'm not the best at wrapping things up in a bow.

Murder Most Foul at House on the Hill

Crime mystery in dreams last night- first dream, something about an envelope, I can't remember? Second one though, final dream, doing the whole "crash a bus with their corpse in it to make it look like they died in a bus crash" trope, but don't make it out in time after propping down the gas pedal, also perishing.

I'm still obsessed with murder mystery tropes and iconography after Glass Onion a month ago. Clue really is a terrible game, but it's just so darn intriguing! Weapons, suspects, locations- they barely manage to get it to make any sense in the Clue movie, but them's the breaks; it doesn't make diegetic sense, but locations and suspects and weapons are all really murder mystery trope-y and there are a lot of those in Clue and that makes it awesome!, in theme if not in gameplay. If only there were a way to offer up red herrings in here or something! And also if only there were more hedge mazes! And some other stuff...

I've been poking around with combining my ideas on improving Clue with my unrelated ideas on improving Betrayal at House on the Hill, which is another one of those games we keep coming back to in spite of the really crufty gameplay because of its strong theme. (The third edition came out just a few months ago, but I don't know much about it, whether it improves on or supplants some of the complaints I have here.) The haunt- or perhaps, the murder!- is one aspect that gets brought up a lot, the betrayal itself that always seems to leave one side or the other at a major disadvantage, but there are more problems than that. The chrome, the fiddly little exceptions exemplified by the cardboard bits and chits- there's a drip in this one room, there's an elevator that leads here here or here. 

(Eurogames vs Ameritrash is a false dichotomy, an ossified product of early 2010's culture introduced into hobby gaming vocabulary by coincidence of timing between two broad trends in gaming happening to be noticed at the same time that internet connectivity really started taking off in hobby spaces... but this kind of thing, the Drip, is what the term Ameritrash was created to describe, heavily thematic exceptions to game rules laid out in components instead of being folded more elegantly into gameplay.)

It's the kind of thing, I think, that game-integrated apps were invented to supplant, in other words. I've also meanwhile been thinking about the affordances of such apps, things that would be not difficult but impossible to implement in physical componentry. The Forgotten Waters app could conceivably be replaced by a really really big deck of Crossroads cards, even the Search for Planet X app could be replaced with some sort of randomized booklet-length lookup table; but it would be impossible, flat out impossible even with closed envelopes, to have a hypothetical mechanic with secret anonymous bribes you can accept or reject, or a realtime English auction where you don't know who's even bidding but you do know what the bid is, or where it's a secret if anybody is calling or folding on the current bid. It can't be too app-dependent of course, else why not just play a computer game instead, but the app would need to be entirely essential.

So continuing from this idea- Betrayal at House on the Hill, one awkward clunk to its gameplay is the transition between the cooperative and competitive game modes as the haunt is revealed. All parties know who the traitor is, and that person has to leave the room and both parties have to read their separate instructions on how to interface with this new scenario, as the modes and gameplay diverge wildly from haunt to haunt. (Once again, the third edition has some revamped haunt rules which probably streamlines this, but I don't have firsthand experience with that and it's probably nothing to the extent of undoing anything I'm suggesting.) In an app-based Betrayal-like, it wouldn't even be necessary to have the identity of the traitor be public information. Or even have the traitor be a player character! Make the rules smooth and uniform, of course, so that everyone knows their role- that's essential, because if there's any confusion, well that blows the hidden bit doesn't it.

There are a lot of other ideas I'm fiddling with in the back of my skull, which make the game increasingly less Betrayal-like as new incentives need to be introduced in order to make the potential-betrayal hidden-role mechanic work smoothly. Character relationships, for one, where every member of the cast seems to have a history with each other in intricate ways, some of which may end up being plot critical, some of which may end up being red herrings. Put like that, it doesn't need to be House on the Hill-based at all! But that opening, like in chess the game opening, the start of the game the exploration of the mansion and its grounds, I can't get that out of my head in terms of murder mystery location tropes. The exploration aspect is too compelling for me to give up on- who needs how it works in Clue, which has its Tudor Manor/Boddy Mansion all laid out and known? Give me the delicious discovery of hidden passageways, the realization of the methods even to eavesdrop on secrets and scandal. The murder can even be triggered by some equivalent of Omen cards, like in the standard game (weapon cards, perhaps...), though possibly with some randomization thrown in as well, afforded by the app-driven nature of this aspect of the narrative. And so the mystery begins: whodunnit, of course, but also to whom- an NPC? or a player character? And that player would of course then have to step into the new role of an inspector showing up at the front doorstep...

It could even be considered a prologue to some certain ghost-based scenarios of Betrayal, who knows.

Dreaming in Murder Mysteries

decided to add an illustration to this post; 'member this one?

 I'd been going to share some plots with you, last night's dream (this morning's really, sleeping in so that I miss as little as possible) until I realized that it's actually kind of boring and not mysterious. The, check in the envelope was sent, see I can't even finish the sentence.

But that one was told backwards, the dream, it started at the end of the mystery story and each scene took place before the one preceding it in the narrative. Like Memento I guess. Interesting way to tell a mystery story, one that I don't think has ever been done before! maybe.

Except in mememto I guess.

One from earlier, dream plot, time travel back to when the murder victim was in utero (one of a pair of twins) and you think that it's, man I can't finish that sentence either, that is also too boring. But that the dreams are both murder mysteries and time travel stories is interestimg.

Stupidly Belated Development in the Crashed Computer Saga

Alright so i"ve been waiting for the shipping label to come in the mail like I said but it's been a few weeks and I just figured the mail's been super slow-which it has been!- so I didn't worry too much about it until recently; next month's Brandon Sanderson box already arrived in the mail, but still no DriveSavers shipping label. 

So I go back and check my old e-mails to see what the deal with that could be, which is difficult as I still haven't logged onto anything on my desktop computer yet (aside from Patreon to download a couple of podcast episodes to listen to at work) and so use this laptop for all of that, which, need I remind you, is slowish and immobile as it needs to be plugged in because its battery won't charge. I'm writing a blog post today anyway so it's not too much of an extra step to, switch over to my e-mail tab from my blogger tag. Turns out. 

Turns out I've had the shipping label all year, they e-mailed it to me on the day I spoke to them! When Steve said he was mailing the label to me I just assumed snail mail, and didn't bother checking my inbox! Theoretically there's been enough time that I could have all my data back by now already! 

It's just so stupid.

So stupid it's brilliant?

Eh. No, no probably not.

(The reason I haven't logged into anything much yet on my desktop is because it spends a lot of time not even being turned on- heck, I still haven't done any Wordle or anything even. The reason it's shut off so much is because I was doing experiments with the guts of the machine- the internally SATA-connected drives weren't working, and I finally figured out that it has to do with the ports themselves and is not the drives' or cables' fault, as those function perfectly well on other machines. I poked around all the places with computer parts in town on Monday or Tuesday, and, though USB-to-SATA cords exist, and are relatively inexpensive, it would have to be one of those buy online type of deals.)

Followup on Christmas Wish List!

I guess I'm blogging (at least?) once a week this year; I guess that's technically a resolution. I guess these sound like Mountain Goats lyrics.

I'm reading one (1) chapter a day of the latest Brandon Sanderson, the Secret Project whose name I probably don't have to not-spoil because it's published now; the audiobook I'm listening to right now is The Moons of Barsk. My blogpost next week will probably be a writeup on that! It's good! and weird! And I'd forgotten how good and weird these books are! 

Anyway there's a company called DriveSavers, data recovery people, who are ostensibly sending me some kind of label in the mail so as for me to mail my fried drive to them for them to recover what had been on it. The mail's only coming once every other day or something, right now, so everything has been super slow! But my final few Christmas gifts have arrived; of my wishlist I received That Time You Killed Me on the day itself (which Alex wrote about on his blog), Paint the Roses in the mail a couple of days ago boy did it take a while (we've played it a couple of times; maybe I'll do a fuller writeup of that too), Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering in the mail like a week ago, still tardy but not as tardy as the other one. And Moons of Barsk I just got for myself on Audible like I said. So, yeah the label is probably coming? The mail being slow has given me the opportunity to peep and tinker inside the computer for a bit more, so we'll see if we even need that service, if the problem even was what we thought it was...

I told you about finding my Playstation! Now I just need to find an HDMI cable that's not in use.

Let's see what else... A Nintendo Switch and the Mission: Impossible movies and Stationfall? I guess I've thought about those yes. There's a Stationfall how-to-play video made using Tabletop Game Simulator, or whatever that Steam thing's name is, so I guess it's available there; I don't have Steam right now! And I'm continually kicking myself for not having saved my Adobe projects to the Adobe cloud they keep on trying to shove down your throat although it really would be a lifesaver to have! My computer is up and running, I've redownloaded a few of the Adobe programs; I'm still writing these from my laptop because right now Adobe is the only thing I'm logged into on the desktop computer.

Good news! Bad News! (Unrelated.)

 Alright so bad news is I didn't spring for the audiobook level 11 months ago or however long because I wasn't an audiobook listener back then, so as nice as it would be to have that now and listen to BRANDO SANDERSON'S SECRETY PROJECT NO 1 as an audiobook I'll have to read it at not-work and find something else to listen to at work-work. 

Good news is I found my playstation 4; it was behind the plant in the corner the whole time.

Errands (Boring)

This has been a day! The afternoon at least. I went into town and ran, like, three errands! And then came home and fed Grandma and then went to Michael's house for like an hour and a half and went to the Jamiesons' for like half an hour... Alright so it doesn't sound exciting but I picked up some contact lens fluid at CVS... woo.

Anyway I designed the prototype logo for the Valentine 5K and got to show it (off?) and I took my computer back into town again, I'm hoping and praying that things turn out ideal therein but am willing to accept any outcome... even if the computer is dead forever or something, the more I think about it the more I'm certain that I do want to finish that big project that's mostly lost by now. In some form or other at least...

Jingle Bells, Batman Smells...

 

Merry Christmas everyone.

Christmas Card 2022???

It's Sir Gawain whose quest for the Green Knight happened at Yuletide. So I broke my computer again anyway. So this crappy image was unreasonably difficult to make, even after drawing. Drew a picture, took a photo of it with my phone, edited it on my phone including cropping and adding the little kiss as a sticker, saved that, took a photo of the screen using Mac Photo Booth (which flipped the image), saved that as an image (Photo Booth photos don't automatically save.) Thought I'd be able to crop the image on the mac but no. Whatever. I'll add some text later, take a photo of the screen using my cell phone, and post that on Instagram. Some time after Christmas, when it's too late to be a Christmas card. Gawain and the Green Knight, also kind of a New Year's thing; the twelve days of Christmas start on the 25th, not end on them...

Pinocchini pt 2: Il Paese dei Balocchi

We watched Glass Onion last night, with the timing being such that we finished at midnight, so I didn't have time to make my Christmas Radio pt 2 post. I'll fill that in later as well.

Anyway I finished both of this year's Pinocchio movies today (Pinocchio: a True Story also came out this year, but it is based rather around The Golden Key, a Russian children's novel (admittedly inspired by Pinocchio's) in actuality a different story and here named after Pinocchio instead of Buratino for the brand recognition (I still want to see it?)) and anyway I have Thoughts. Most of them having to do with The Land of Toys/Toyland/Pleasure Island (Paese dei Balocchi: Paese is ambiguously sized in Italian, could mean country, village, land...; Balocchi is one of the words meaning toy or plaything. Translated as the "Country of Playthings" by Walter Samuel Cramp, "Land of Boobies" by Mary Alice Murray, "Playtime Land" by Joseph Walker...)

No Land of Toys in GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S PINOCCHIO but fascist child-soldier boot camp, which I am not equipped to unpack, although unpacking that would doubtless be quite fruitful. Gas masks as donkey faces, I... Anyway, since most of my thoughts have to do with Pleasure Island in these adaptations, that means I actually don't have much to say about the Netflix movie, and will mostly be talking about the Disney one? And a few other adaptations I can read the Disney one against.

Pleasure Island in Disney's PINOCCHIO is Zemeckis at his Zemeckisiest, an increasingly nightmarish thrillride, a corrupted version of the whimsical occasionally-literal roller coasters of the Polar Express, whose more frightening aspects are tempered by this strangely literalizing grounding force? There's a room Lampwick and Pinoke are conveyed through full of clocks being smashed without any seeming symbolism behind it, children would want to smash timepieces because children apparently find destroying clockwork fun, but the clocks may or may not have been manufactured by Geppetto and Pinoke, um, clocks this, but there's no room for that to breathe symbolically either because of the frequency with which they bring that up.

The Land of Toys in Matteo Garrone's 2019 Pinocchio was, I'm not sure if I posted about this at the time but wanted to bring up now in conversation with the Zemeckis imagining, but, really tangible, I mean, you could tell it was a big set somewhere, an actual old fairground or converted barn or something. And pretty quaint by today's standards but in a way that's probably the point, having little slides around and everything would probably have been mindblowing to children from the 19th century Italian countryside. 

The donkey transformation in Roberto Bernini's 2002 Pinocchio is the most effective of any I've seen. It shows just enough that you're not sure how much it actually shows and how much you're imagining. The 1940 Disney version is also of course effectively nightmarish, let's dub that a close second. Zemeckis's version is surprisingly close to the 1940 transformation, sans the smoking and alcohol in that scene- it's not really scary, but it's not not-scary. Until the 2D animation of the shadow showing Lampwick's final bit of morphic, which is really floaty with its implied volume (I suspect they're going from 2D silhouettes and morphing by mapping individual lines from their places on one model to the next?)

The carriage driver in the Zemeckis Pinocchio is played by Luke Evans and they manage to make it work super well, like, super well? Fox and Cat were aligned with the character in Pinocchio 1940 but they're not here so they just sort of disappeared off the face of the earth I guess.

Christmas Radio pt 1

I didn't have the chance to post Wednesday or Tuesday of this week (yesterday and, ereyester wasn't that the word) because I was too busy playing games, basically going over midnight. Let's say that I make up for those posts later, one of them on talking about the games themselves perhaps; and one of them about my brother's post here which I just read, and was posting a comment to, before realizing it didn't really address the main body of the question (I probably would have seen and read it earlier.) I'd been going to post at lunch today, which would have given me time for a post and games, but didn't (too busy teaching, though not playing, a game at lunch break (Terraforming Mars.)) I will still write on the subject I'd been going to, but with a few more hours' experience with the subject this time.

Christmas radio! I listened to it all day at work today! Finally being put in the holiday spirit. But if just a few more hours' listening time really refined my thoughts as much as they did, I'm kind of half debating listening to even another day of Christmas radio at work tomorrow, to have honed my experience even further! I think I'll do that actually. I'll just say this instead, the history that led up to my listening to the radio at work.

Listening to podcasts and audiobooks, of course. On my old phone, which doesn't have that much memory so I have to break things into chunks. Finished The Lost Metal for the second time and am now conversant enough in it; listened meanwhile to a podcast on the Disney+ series Andor, and a couple of miscellaneous episodes of other podcasts (generally it goes, listen to audiobook in the morning, and podcast stuff after lunch. Riveting information, maybe not, but it explains how I break down listening to multiple things. Downloaded the DecodingTV episodes on my dad's computer (my own computer having crashed of course) and transferred them over via USB cable, and the other episodes I just downloaded straight to the downloads folder on the phone.)

I'm on Wizard and Glass in my Dark Tower reading in my audio book journey, but Just King Things won't come out with their The Waste Lands episode until next month so I'm holding out on starting that. There is a nonfiction I want to get to, not from Audible, but I figured I could download and get on that the week after Christmas, and as for books from Audible man I don't know, I've got one credit to spend on whatever but I don't know what that should be. I can also get to that later. For now... Christmas radio is still on!

You can use your headphone cable as an antenna, which requires non-wireless earbuds, but which allows you to turn a cell phone with the appropriate radio bits built in as a radio. For some reason doing this restarts my phone every hour or so and I have to turn the radio back on manually from there, but it doesn't take the length of a song to do so so I didn't miss a single Christmas song on Sunny 106.9 FM all day from 7:00 in the morning to 4:15 in the evening. Except for the hour between 12:30 and 1:30 where I was at lunch break of course. It's almost ten hours of exposure to Christmas radio, but it still is less than ten hours, so I think doing the same listening tomorrow will double my sample size...

Pinocchini

45 minutes into Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio on Netflix and also Robert Zemeckis's Disney's Pinocchio on Disney+ and there are truly a bizarre amount of parallelisms, such that one who had never read the original book would think maybe the original book started out as a sort of The Hidden Fortress thing revolving around the cricket the way Star Wars starts out following the droids, and Geppetto really did construct the puppet as a replacement for his deceased son, and it was a deliberate act on Pinocchio's part to join the puppet show for fortune and glory rather than go to school and learn his letters and make his papa proud- but like, lol nope, these are all creative liberties that both adaptations took with the story completely independently for some reason. 

The Cricket appears in like two scenes in the original book (dies in the first scene he's in; second time shows up as a ghost); I don't recall Geppetto having ever had a family, and the log was already alive when he started carving it; Pinocchio gets distracted on his way to school, the price of admission to see the show happens to be as much as he can sell his letter book for, and he gets shanghai'd into being part of the show from there when the stringed marionettes who are apparently fully sapient notice him in the audience and call attention to his presence. It's weird?

Go read the original book, is my point. The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. It's bug wild, it's a relatively brief read, and it's in the public domain. K.C. "This is fine" Green has a fully faithful webcomic adaptation here if that's more your speed, which I never pass up the opportunity to plug, but like. Seriously what a wonderful book.

From what I've seen so far the Netflix one, well obviously seeing how it's based on the book and not an intermediary adaptation, does have some- some!- of the weirder stuff from the original book, but the Zemeckis one is plenty weird as well for, Zemeckis reasons, and Disney live-action-remake reasons. Probably not worth watching on its own terms, but that's par for the course on Disney remakes; their watchability is reliant on intertextuality. I happen to be on both a Zemeckis kick and a Joseph Gordon-Levitt kick (voices Jiminy in this one, allegedly) so I decided to check it out, and, well I'm fascinated by these very specific adaptational choices, among other things, so I'm not regretting this time, even though it's clear that Del Toro has a lot more on his mind in his telling of the tale.

An hour into both, now, and the parallelisms are drifting apart now, but we'll see if Guillermo Del Toro gets interested in Pleasure Island any time soon (it doesn't show up in the book until near the end, so probably not...) 

Month to Month Resuscitation

 November passed very very slowly, which isn't what has been happening to December. Though at no point in November did I finish the Halloween short story from October? I should do that one of these posts...

Think I already brought up the idea of November having been Nanowrimo and doing all that writing for that project; should've waited to bring it up here maybe because now I'm actually talking about stuff where that would fit perfectly. 

Anyway I say that December's been passing far more quickly than November which still feels true, but it feels like a pretty long while ago where I wrote about being out of disposable gloves.

Cap'n Patches('s Head on the) Writer's Block

So, still uncertain if I'm going to be pursuing that project anymore (I've made two videos so far this decade, but haven't lost any subscribers to my lack of productivity) I realize, a couple of weeks past NaNoWriMo, that maybe my writing of last month has all been a bust, because that's what it had been spent on. Strange. Oh well, onto discussing other projects! And potential brick walls therein...

Cap'n Patches is the Cat of Nine Tales. He's after the Pieces of Eight. Each Tale is going to, well it's not a simple one-to-one tale=tale about piece of eight, but for the rough majority of them that's how it plays out. And I've got every Tale plotted out except for the first one, which I know is going to be a heist but the location I've got them heisting from I've written as being so secure I don't know how they're going to pull it off... 

They say if you've got writer's block then the problem lies not at the block itself but a little bit before it, like there was some decision-making mistake just a little back down the road that you need to deal with instead. I'm not sure how well that applies here, at the beginning and everything. I happen to be a slow, cumulative sort of writer as it is, so I don't know if I'm truly at a problem point or not. I'll start doing some brainstorming tomorrow.

Koloss Head-munching day only a couple of days away now...

And the Computer Came Back But Turns Out It Won't Power Up; I'm Not Sure if They Tested It at the Shop

 Like plugging it in makes it act like it's receiving power for a few seconds, with the lights and the internal fans and things, but then that just quits and it acts like it's not even plugged in at all? Bother.

Anyway I have come to the possibility that maybe, it is a potential possibility perhaps, that it is within the realms of plausibility, that mayhap my cold came from being out in the rain and all, doing the live nativity program on Saturday. It just had an eclipse phase of a couple of days for some reason. I read this science thing! They said that the cold weakens your immune system! And we're just living in a terrifying ecosystem of germs just constantly, apparently.

Whoops I Irreplicably Fried My Drive Working on the Major Project I'd Had Going on for Literally the Whole Decade So Far??

Alright so. I'm not sure how much can be salvaged of this, seeing how the original file was stored on a hard drive that didn't fry, an old C: drive of an old computer hooked up externally to the new one, but... since then, with all the Adobe updates going on and each new year needing an upgraded filetype and thus needing a new file building off of the old ones, I'm sure the project must have at some point migrated onto the new, internal and now fried, drive of the new computer. It was certainly saving to the desktop, and I don't think as a shortcut. 

And it feels like I've been swinging from vine to vine all this time and missed this last one? 

So let me explain that. There had been, like I said, an old computer whose files I managed to salvage, and there are nested generations of that, from that and onto that and from there onto this. And I did manage, I had managed, to get the computer booted after the fry, and everything was up and running, until I restarted it without backing anything up from there-- and really why would I have with everything looking good? 

(The reason I restarted the computer from there had to do with, well, Adobe updates...)

So I'm not sure what the state of the project I'd been working on, the one that had required such intensive processing as to fry my dude, will look like; it was a video file so (most of) the footage it was comprised of is still extant (and much else quite replicable, even if it's going to be a hassle to do so) and the progress missing mostly the editing of those files, and even the data that those files should even be part of the project.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. Still too foggy-headed from my cold to really care about much, and the fact that I haven't had usage of my desktop PC in over a week anyway puts further distance on it. Not sure if this is another one of those Greatest American Hero situations where I felt relieved when McKenna spurned my advances, or what. We'll put in a new C drive and, see, where to go from there; too soon to call anything past that, whether I just abandon the project entirely or, what.

Is It Perfume from a Dress That Makes Me So Digress?

 

I love gumbo but it feels like every time I eat it is when I get a cold. That's not how allergies work though? soI'm sure it must be a coincidence.

Recuperating. I slept a lot today. Though not quite enough...

(we'll see how I feel tomorrow)