Robust McManlyPants on Average Display

Dark Stores from the site Not If But When.

Particular People (PDF link), my NaNoWriMo last year, was set in the very real 100 Oaks Mall – a wonderfully ironic name that made me wonder if that’s how many trees they cut down to build the place or if they instead had installed 100 saplings in containers inside the mall. 100 Oaks was a Nashville, TN, shopping mall that opened and closed repeatedly over the course of its life. It’s now been bought by Vanderbilt and is being redeveloped as medical offices or something. When I asked KJ to get me pictures of it last year she couldn’t because it had been closed off in preparation for that work.

On a practical level, of course, it’s always preferable to see existing spaces redeveloped instead of new projects take up new spaces but were I king tomorrow I would decree that a certain percentage of dead retail and development spaces had to be kept around, unmaintained, as silent monuments to… something. Hubris? Ecology? I don’t even know what lesson is to be learned there, just that there is a lesson there of some sort. That the CitySearch page for 100 Oaks is still up is both amusing and insufficient.

I spent part of yesterday morning and afternoon fiddling with the Wordpress theme I use on this blog. Originally – years ago – I used Connections, but then over time I started fiddling with the colors and the font and that turned into fiddling with the banner image at the top (the current one is a scanned photograph I took in the early ’90s while driving from somewhere or another back to my hometown). There is an updated, widget-enabled version of Connections called Connections Reloaded but when I tried applying it I found that some of the sizes of things had changed and I just didn’t feel like spending all day trying to turn it back into my modded version of Connections so instead I stole its sidebar.php file and started fiddling in order to Widgetize my now heavily modified version of old-school Connections.

In the course of doing so I also (finally – it’s only been, oh, five years since I started using this theme) cracked open the stylesheet sufficiently long to find the text-alignment and blockquote settings so now everything is justified and blockquotes are gloriously unitalicized. You have no idea how long I have hated my theme’s italicized blockquotes. I have abandoned posts containing blockquotes because I decided I couldn’t handle staring at that much italicized text. Seriously. Yes, I am a little insane.

Now I have a widgetized sidebar, though, which was fun to play with. I also have a mystery “Meta” box that doesn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular in my theme so I’m a little confused about how to get rid of it. Ah well, I’ll probably figure it out in five years. In the meantime I am ridiculously pleased to have a last.fm widget. I started with the last.fm widget in the Wordpress widget database – the one that’s old and doesn’t work anymore – and manually replaced the last.fm script it called with one I generated using their create-a-widget tool, then fiddled with sizes both within the last.fm widget and within my theme to try to get the widget and sidebar to more or less fit together. Whee! Sometimes I remember that I enjoy being a nerd.

3,791 words. My main character, it turns out, is named Jason Marks and his office (he’s an independent insurance agent in Nashville, TN in 1983) is in a dying shopping mall. At least a part of last night’s writing time was spent reading deadmalls.com, a site that is every bit as awesome as its name suggested it would be. His only work friend is a screaming queen who works at the Orange Julius. Jason Marks is also, it turns out, not nearly as nice as I had thought he would be but I suspect that’s going to be his arc: learning a little empathy in the course of having his entire world completely fucked over by one dead country star.

I’m going to try to cross the 5,000 word mark tonight before bed since I won’t get to do a lick of writing on Tuesday. Truly, I love November.

mrh has started what is basically the coolest thing ever: a blog that tracks pundit predictions in order to gauge the (in)correctness of pundits. Today he lines up a couple of posts about Apple’s now-present-future and some older political predictions we can now properly measure.

I crossed the 50K word mark a week in advance of the deadline though I still haven’t finished the story. One more chapter, maybe two, and an epilogue. Period. I’m estimating 60,000 to 65,000 words as the final final count. Regardless, year five has been a success. I feel much better about this one than I did last year’s.

On a completely unrelated note, my gallery gets a fair amount of comment spam I have to go in and delete every now and again. These are almost universally from .cn addresses advertising two things at once. As such, tonight I received a comment spam (sadly, now deleted) which tied the concept of Tr/ama/dol together with Castlevania and my first thought on reading it was, Wow, that sounds awesome!

This showed up in moderation as a comment on this post:

Bush goes ballistic about other countries being evil and dangerous, because they have weapons of mass destruction. But, he insists on building up even a more deadly supply of nuclear arms right here in the US. What do you think? How does that work in a democracy again? How does being more threatening make us more likeable?Isn’t the country with
the most weapons the biggest threat to the rest of the world? When one country is the biggest threat to the rest of the world, isn’t that likely to be the most hated country?
What happened to us, people? When did we become such lemmings?
We have lost friends and influenced no one. No wonder most of the world thinks we suck. Thanks to what george bush has done to our country during the past three years, we do!

Now, normally I’d completely buy that’s a real comment. Not here, necessarily, as time has revealed the “politics” category to get smaller and smaller as an overall percentage of what I post about. This is a blog that can get political not a political blog. Still, I’ve seen worse. The URL field for the comment gave it away as a spam comment, but this is what fascinates me: that spam would be so adaptive.

I know, I know, realizing them spammers are some clever chaps is so 1999. Still, I’m intrigued. Was there some enterprising spammer out there who wrote a commentbot and had it hit anything that turned up in, say, a Google search for “liberal blog?” Or – and this is what interests me more, though I’m not sure why – have the winds changed such that a spammer somewhere just wrote up a generic Bush-bashing comment and shotgun-blasted it in hopes it would be more successful than the usual “Nice post… !” spam commentary?

In other words, is it just clever targeting or a sign of the times?

Unrelated: Is it just me or have the Bush years just flown by compared to the Reagan era? It just seems like Reagan spent a lot more time bumbling around the Oval Office trying to find the corners so he could cut them, too. Bush seems so… fast. Of course, it could just be that I was in, um, elementary and middle schools for the Reagan administration whereas I’ve been a late-20’s/early-30’s person for the entirety of Bush.

In honor of the best apostropher.com thread ever, I give you this:

UPDATE:  Now that I’m on my desktop and have better tools, I’d probably go with the one below; Gaijin Biker is right in that it needed to be more contrasty.  Well, in truth, I’d probably make one image out of both of them to preserve the lettering from the first draft but use the more stencil-looking portrait of the second:

And, having seen Gorbachev mentioned in the thread linked above, I did this one while I was at it:

Honestly, this takes like five minutes.

1998 rang and they’d like their Internet meme back, so I guess I’d better stop using it now.

Have you seen Bascha’s pictures of Dorian? Holy. Cow. My brain just blew a cuteness fuse.

Also, the whole Fortuny thing. That link goes to a Wired blog, from there you can get to the (ahem) raw data if you want. In other words, the link in this post, the one you’re reading right now, is work-safe, but anything past there is totally uncharted territory. My take? Fortuny’s a tool and I don’t wish actual physical retribution on him but I do expect he’ll spend a while hiding behind someone or another’s couch every time he happens to see some huge ‘roid-hound looking his direction at the mall, and he deserves every ounce of fear he suffers for it. I mean, seriously, pick a better target if you’re going to play stupid bullying pranks, kid. I thought RandroidsObjectivists were supposed to be all rational and shit, but he couldn’t work that one out for himself? Really? That maybe it wouldn’t be smart to piss off a couple hundred guys who derive sexual gratification from inflicting physical and verbal abuse? Oy! Ayn should have gotten a smarter batch of disciples.

Now, a few notes for people whose Google searches lead them here:

• Please, for fuck’s sake, I’ll say it again: Just buy The American Astronaut if you want to watch it, there’s even a “Buy Now!” link right there on the goddamn page, I cannot believe you would rip off an indie movie by trying to download it. Jerks.
• Are you ready for one giant skate for derbykind? This weekend sees The Carolina Rollergirls take on the Sin City Rollergirls (of Vegas, naturally) in their first ever bout at Dorton Arena.
• No, really, I have no idea what happens to you if you hide from a cop in Virginia. I’m betting it means eventual arrest, however!

In videogames news: LEGO Star Wars II. The original trilogy. Aw yeah!

I have also signed up for NetFlix recently, and so we’re working our way through a whole slew of noir mysteries and documentaries on a variety of topics. I’ve finally rated enough movies that NetFlix is starting to recommend things that might be to my liking – such as Depeche Mode concert DVDs – but it’s also making some surprising remarks on my entertainment tastes. I currently have Wigstock in my queue – I cannot watch that movie enough times, I should just buy the damn thing – and have highly rated a few other queer-themed films and chosen “Not Interested” for the plethora of Bible stories they wanted me to watch. This apparently means, in NetFlix’ opinion, that I should watch a saucy teen drama from France titled Come Together. Ahem. The cover has two teenage boys shirtlessly making eyes at you. I did not add it to my queue, because if I want porn there’s a whole internet of it out here, but I was amused by the user review that concluded the film, which offers a richly acted, tense and complicated drama, “sadly does not include as much nudity as the cover suggests.” Eek.

At any rate, if you want to “Friends” me on NetFlix – which I take is all the rage on these webbertron things – then email me and I’ll let you know the address by which I signed up.

Finally, I’ve spent much of this week playing with my User Interface in World of Warcraft. My new flavor is Insomniax, a combination of Discord Unit Frames, BibBars and CT_Mod. Bottom line: I’ve totally smashed my old UI to pieces and rearranged it to buy back a lot of real estate on the screen. Tasty. I’ll have some before-and-after screenshots up sometime, probably tomorrow.

Just a test post, as I appear to be having issues today.

My absolute favorite things about having a blog is the search strings that lead people to it.  Of recent note:

• “kitten names,” over and over and over again
• “penalty for hiding from a cop in leesburg va” – let me assure you, whoever you were, that you should get an attorney
• “manly c/ocks,” Googleproofed because, really, I don’t need those people leaving comments
• “morphed c/ocks,” see above (and what the hell, exactly, is that about anyway?)
• “conspiracy theories proven true,” which really makes me want to ask what their angle is

Yes, it’s a slow week.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, I’m currently reading 2012 by Daniel Pinchbeck.  I read Breaking Open the Head last summer, and this summer his new book is either a brilliant work of spiritualism or he’s gone off the deep end.  I’m just not sure.  Either way, it’s fascinating, and I have like ten things I have to Google already out of the first 75 or so pages.

I also recently added the new Moon Knight to my bag at Chapel Hill Comics, which I highly recommend (both the book and the store, actually).  And I picked up Five Fists of Science while I was there, and loved it.  It’s basically the graphic novel love-child of Adventure! and Deadlands.

OK, so I’m seeing something in my referrer logs* from a specific site within pbwiki.com. Is that you? If so, I’m just curious about what you’re linking to. Please feel free to drop me an email by clicking on my name at the top.

–

* I added the italicized words later; funny how it helps when what you say actually makes sense.

Today, mrh posted the 1,000th comment on my blog. Holy crap. That seems like such a mammoth number for such a dusty corner of the webbertrons.

Also: this weekend The Boyf and I went to see The Da Vinci Code, where we ran into Joey and Carl. And I finished The Subtle Knife, the second book of His Dark Materials. I’m currently two chapters into the final novel, The Amber Spyglass. Thoughts below the fold, for spoiler-avoidance.

Seriously, if you’re going to read these books or see this movie and you don’t want spoilers, just know this: if you liked the book The Da Vinci Code, see the movie. If you thought the book TDVC was forgettable crap, guess what? The movie is forgettable crap. If you hated the book TDVC, don’t waste your money. If you haven’t read the book, but are curious about it, save yourself some time and watch the movie. Sir Ian McKellan is worth it, and you will have effectively just read the book because there is not a thing different between them.

Also, His Dark Materials rules us all, and you should read it.

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I am having far too sleepy and bored of a day to blog, and my brain is far too consumed by hatred for this NSA wiretap thing to write anything original. In the spirit of relaxing in anticipation of the weekend, I wish to share with you that b. and Deadblob are food-blogging at the moment, and they are making me so hungry.

Inspired by Bascha, I have updated my book meme entry to include books I loved and books I love so much I’m pretty much always reading them or about to read them.

So, I keep up with what search strings lead people to my blog.  I am egocentric like that.  Mainly I do it because they are hilarious, my all-time fave being when someone ended up here (I know not why) by Googling the phrase “virginia slims 120’s, tranny.”  Since Friday, I have attracted eyeballs with only two topics:  the Waynesville, NC, voluntary castration case, via various search criteria, and, unrelated, the search string “kitten names.”  This is even better.

Why?

Because the kittens got fixed this morning.

I came downstairs as I was getting ready for work and The Boyf was just returning with our two littlest patients and said, “How are the boys doing?”

His response:  “Well, they have air quotes.”

Heh!