Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
streak - Ouch. I'm sorry that happened....
  

    
I don't think he was particularly upset about it. I think he probably felt
exactly what he said - it was an interesting experience, one that, as a
(relatively) affluent white male in the US, he doesn't normally get
firsthand.
At least, that's how I read his post.
  

    
Dianna -- you broke cover! (I met Dianna in Tasmania at a very small
Australian national convention that she was too poor or too busy to
attend. At the time she was a fairy, professionally.)

Mimi -- you're very welcome. I hope you like Shoggoth's on tape. It
was odd doing it in a studio -- I'm so used to the places where the
laughter comes on that one that I've wound up building some very
strange pauses into my mental picture of the story. Which I had to
leave out...

Streak -- I think that the experience of finding oneself an alien, and
a discriminated against one at that, is one of the most salutary one
can have.

...

My Dell notebook's power supply fizzled dramatically and died, burning
a hole in the wire as it went. I spent a happy hour on the phone to
Dell failing to order a replacement, remembering just how much I hate
Dell and how my heart sank when I learned that I was being given a Dell
latitude last year. (One the one hand, it was a free computer; on the
other hand, owning a Dell computer means that, sooner or later, you
will have to telephone Dell, and that is where the trouble will start.)
  

    
I would have thought you'd have done anything to avoid having another Dell
computer at this point.
  

    
Email from dianna:

Neil - Martha made me do it.  And it was both - flat broke and had a huge
Cinema Studies assignment due in that Monday. Ahhh, student life...  *So*
glad you did Shoggoth's. What about The Goldfish Pool?

Martha - i'm very shy but i came out for selfish reasons. Want to read
more of your stories :)

dianna
  

    
Email from Cindy:

Hello everyone!  Happy spring, or fall, as the case may be....
 
Dear Neil,

     Did you get to do any spring planting this year?  Will you be
planting more pumpkins?
 
Cindy,
Who has planting on the brain, because that's all she's been doing, to the
point she dreams of it. 
  

    
Mimi -- Who, me? Why yes, I adore anime. ^_^

Neil -- Sorry to hear about the computer, both that it's a Dell and
that its battery fizzled.


So the other night I had a really strange dream that involved
something that was just a hair shy of vagina dentata, and after I woke
up it occured to me to wonder, what would Freud have called the
Corinthian?  Occulata dentata?  (It has a certain ring to it, like that
Lion King song.)
  

    
Dan Guy - *yay!* Fu fu. (feeling too subdued for an 'O HO HO HO HO~')
It was the smileys and the speed with which you pulled out the Robotech
reference for Michelle a while back. ^_^; 

[start rant]
Discrimination - Well, I'm just sorry that anyone has to experience
that anywhere... especially when they're visiting my home town. :/ I
know people can be prejudiced. They may have reasons that are social,
economical, political, war memories etc., or no reason at all, but I
just (perhaps naively) feel that people should at least try to respect
each other a little bit more. *sigh* :(
[end rant]

-- Mimi
  

    
DanGuy- About your dream--wow.  Wow.  

I dreamed last night that I was at a party with Johnny Carson, who was
so drunk that he fell into the pool and was drowning.  So of course I
jumped in the pool to save him, only to find that (actor)John C. Reilly
had jumped in too and we both pulled Mr. Carson out, who proceeded to
do a tap dance.  John C. Reilly won an award for bravery and I was
kicked out of the party.  hmmm.  

Neil-- Will Death be shot in NY (or elsewhere) on location, or have
you even gotten that far in all of this?  Is it OK to ask about the
film or would you rather wait till things are further along? Curious...
  

    
Well, thank you, diana.

I dreamed last night I was at a Richard Thompson concert.  And they moved
the stage from end to the other which was annoying because I was in the
front row before, but there were very few people there somehow.  And there
was a small rat running from the stage and when I realized it wasn't a huge
roach I didn't want it killed.  And this has nothing to do with anything.
  

    
        At least in topic 73 we had "Dream" in the topic title.  Here all we
can discuss is nationalism and religion.
  

    
        Oh, and countdowns.  Can't forget how many great countdown
conversations I've had.
  

    
Martha--I hate it when I mistake small rats for huge roaches.  hehe. 
What a wonderfuly strange dream.

I recently dreamed that I was a cheese slave in a very classy
resturaunt.  It was my job to carry huge wheels of cheese on my back
across the dining area topless.  The waiters all had little whips to
keep us cheese slaves in check.  Oh the horrors of 5 star resturaunts.

Angelina.  
  

    
Streak--oh jeez.  Thanks for making me laugh entirely too hard in my
school's computer lab.

Angie. 
  

    
Angelina - Hey, I think I've eaten at that restaurant.

*g*
  

    

So Neil, will you be letting this topic (or its successor) know if Death
needs some extras?
  

    
re: Dell, there was an article in the news about a laptop recall due
to a risk of the power supply catching on fire.  Maybe the same
problem?
  

    
<http://support.dell.com/I5000Battery/>
<http://support.dell.com/battery/index.asp>

here is that recall info from Dell.

the following systems are affected:
Latitude CPiA 
Latitude CPi R 
Latitude CPtC 
Latitude CPtS 
Latitude CPtV 
Latitude CPxH 
Latitude CPxJ 
Inspiron 3700 
Inspiron 3800
Inspiron 5000
Inspiron 5000e
  

    
neil - i'm sure this has been asked and answered already , but who are
you working with on the new spoken word records ? will dmckean be
doing some sounds again ? looking forward for the rerelease of '
warning ' as well . . . it appears that i'm not going be be getting my
copy back . friends always seem to poorly understand what it means to
borrow things .

sined .
  

    
Neil -- the way to beat Dell is to pretend you're stocking
up for an earthquake.  Buy an extra two or three of everything --
two power supplies, three batteries, two PC Card modems, two CD-ROM
drives, etc.  Unlike with the tech support department, you don't
have to be Clarence Darrow pleading your case for a free replacement.
The spare parts department will usually just take your credit
card number and ship you what you order within two to three days.

On the bad battery thing -- the web page seems to work.  You
go there, type in the numbers on your battery, and if it turns
out to be one of the suspect ones, you can click a button and
they'll automatically ship you a replacement without you
having to telephone them.  (You have to type in the Service Tag
number on the first page of the support.dell.com page for this
to work.)   I'm not terribly paranoid about the battery recall news.
I've apparently got one of the bad ones.  But, after four months of
use, it hasn't caught fire or exploded yet.  So I'm going to keep using
it for the next few days, until the replacement gets here.  (As
a crumb to customers, if you put the bad battery in the return mail
package, they're promising to ship an extra good one to you at
no charge.)
  

    
Dianna -- didn't do the Goldfish Pool this go around, as I wanted to
try and do two CDs worth of a good mix of stories, with nothing over 20
minutes. Goldfish is nearly 40. Which doesn't mean I won't do it one
day -- I hope that the CD series will go on until I am old and crabby.

Cindy -- started planting things. The pumpkins are started but not yet
in the ground -- later this week or next week, i suspect.  I need to
set up the water-squirting scarecrows -- last year it was groundhogs,
this year it seems to be rabbits. 

Planted a new apple tree already. A couple of years ago I decided to
try an experiment -- I'd been authoratitively told one should trim back
the branches of a new tree by 30% (to make up for root loss in
transplanting) and also told that one shouldn't. I put in two identical
plum trees -- cut off a third of the branches of one, left the other
as it was.  Had one bare and straggly looking trimmed tree and one
happy looking untrimmed tree. Now, starting their third year, the
trimmed one is a big, happy tree, and the untrimmed one looks like the
sapling I bought, just bigger.

Adriana -- I hope a few scenes will be shot in New York, but mostly I
expect it will be somewhere cheaper (like Toronto) standing in for New
York.

madman --quite possibly. But friends-and-relations make lousy extras
-- they want to be treated like human beings. Whereas most extras only
want to be fed regularly and paid at the end of the evening.

Justin -- if I can get Dave to fit doing sound and music into his
schedule, I will. (Which is to say, he WANTS to do it. But I know how
full his plate is.)

Lenny -- next time (if there is a next time with Dell) I shall take
your advice, for it is good advice. And I'll check the battery thing
(although we already ordered new power pack and battery this morning.)
  

    
        This is my first WELL post since turning twenty-four a few minutes
ago.  I'm drinking Macallan 1980 from a wonderful thick-bottomed
stemless tulip glass I bought in a thrift store.  The Macallan was a
gift for my twenty-third birthday, and its character has changed a bit
over the past year.  It's mellowed a little, and developed sweet
undertones that were only implied before.
        Macallan, more than any other scotch I know, tastes like a map of
Scotland.  In a properly aged and good glass of Macallan, I can taste
all the rounded grassy hills with the huge gray mossy boulders sticking
out of them, all the heather and stone buildings and peat fires, all
the badly-laid-out little roads that just get you lost, and all of it
sitting under this low gray sky that puts a lid and a sense of scale on
the world.  And to think people can still ask me why I don't drink
vodka.
  

    

Sometimes I wonder if maybe you read a little too much into your scotch,
<streak>. But then, hell, some people read tea leaves. Why not read as much
as you can out of whatever says something to you?
  

    
You know, I like the Macallan, but I'd have to drink a whole bottle before I
could taste stone buildings and winding little roads in it....
  

    
Neil -- I am so unbelievably jealous of those who have gotten to read
_American Gods_ already.  Reading the several glowing reviews in the
CompuServe forum did not help, serving only to heighten my
anticipation.  Darn you for writing such wonderful things and for
unleashing this plague of expectation upon me. ^^
     Determined to share the fun, I spent an hour on Sunday calling
all of the book stores in the yellow pages and inquiring when (not if)
they'd be putting AG on the shelves -- and if they plead ignorance of
the title insisting that they order it immediately -- and suggesting
that they might like to even have a little display of it as people come
in the doors.  I think I was reasonably successful; the large chains
all said they'd be stocking it and the indys sounded happy to field
personal requests.  We'll see, I'll be checking up on all of them in
June.

The libraries (all three of them) in this little burg have appalling
taste in books imho.  I'll restrain myself from ranting, but suffices
to say that the librarians clearly love scandal books and romance
novels to the exclusion of all else.  I'll give them the benefit of the
doubt, though, and assume that they haven't been exposed to anything
good outside of that.  So, fed up with the paltry selection, last
Sunday I decided to do what I could to promote promising upcoming
releases.  We'll see what comes of it.  I might have to get a job
working at the library on weekends just so that I'll have an actual say
in what gets ordered, as the librarians themselves seem to take
offense whenever I make requests and suggestions.  (Hence the need for
metaphorical chains last weekend.)
     So that's my two-pronged attack, book stores and libraries.  In
my arrogance, I imagine that I just might be able to cause some small
shift in the reading habits of the community at large.

streak -- Give my regards to 24, and tell it I'll be there shortly.
     I never really thought of my scotch like that.  Do you think
other countries are encapsulated -- or dare I say it, distilled -- in
their liquor?  Having never been to Russia, I personally cannot make
the call on vodka.