- Take the House Season 7 Challenge. Win points by correctly guessing the conditions or diseases that will turn up on the show week to week.
- The Room: The Game. “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” [via]
- Things I’ve Overheard My Roommate Say to Her On-Again/Off-Again Boyfriend or Works by Joyce Carol Oates? [via]
- J.G. Ballard’s self-edits [via]
- And finally, Heather on why you should visit the Banff Centre for the Arts:
Just watch out for the elk. And the mathematicians.
writing
So endeth my vacation
Just a quiet day at home, hurting my brain with the New York Times crossword puzzle. (Maybe it’s just me, with my on-vacation brain, but it seemed kind of hard this week.)
I think my parents brought the rainy weather with them from England, since this is the first rain we’ve had all week, and the weather is starting to cool. Then again, it is already mid-September, so I guess we were due.
Went to my writing group again. This week, this is what forty minutes of free-writing produced:
One hour later, it still didn’t work.
“You might as well give up,” Samuel told her. “After nightfall, the incantations aren’t going to work, even if you do chance upon the right one. We really should start looking for shelter.”
“The temple is shelter,” Tabitha said. “I just need to — ” she glanced at the weathered spell book in her hands — “‘pierce the obsidian veil of…’ It has to be on one of these pages.”
“For all we know, Amos was a fraud,” said Samuel. “He said he was part of the Order, but that didn’t save his life at the pass. And if we’re still out here when it gets dark, we’re risking our own lives.”
Tabitha sighed. “That’s just an old wives’ tale,” she said. “Nightwalkers, moonwraiths…”
“Trust me,” said Samuel, “they’re real. And nothing in that book is going to protect us from them if they decide to attack.”
“There’s nowhere else for miles,” she said. “These are the northern wastes. If we can’t unlock the temple, where do you suggest we go?”
He hefted his pack to his shoulder. “I spied some caves to the east. Maybe an hour’s hike. We should start moving.”
She held out the book. “I think that’s a mistake. We’re really close. And Amos die to protect this book. He died protecting us from — ”
“Amos died because he was an idiot. If he was a real sorcerer, he never would have been exiled. We never would have been saddled with him in the first place. We’d still be living in Bartertown. We’d still — ”
“They almost killed you in Bartertown.”
“Yeah, well, that was a misunderstanding. If you’d seen the magistrate’s wife, you’d have thought she was half orc, too.”
“Face it, Samuel, it’s the temple or nothing.”
“Then I’m afraid it must be nothing,” said a voice from behind her. A robed figure appeared from the side of the building, a pair of short swords sheathed at her hips. “The temple is cursed. None of the Order’s prayers will unlock the doors now.”
“And who are you supposed to be?” asked Samuel. “The Order’s last guardian, left behind to guard their outpost?”
“Not quite,” said the woman. “I’m the one who killed the last guardian. And I’m here to make sure the curse is never lifted.”
She smiled. “So,” she said, “which of you would like to die first?”
And that’s about it. It’s weird to think I have to go back to work tomorrow. I haven’t been there since the Friday before Labor Day, and even that was only a half day. I’m hoping I can get back into the swing of things pretty quickly, getting to work on the same train I was taking during summer hours, but being able to leave at 4:30 instead of 5:15 every day.
I haven’t glanced once at my work e-mail in all the time I was off. I wonder if that was a mistake…
We’ll see tomorrow.
At least I don’t work at Dunder-Mifflin
I spent the day, again, cleaning, and watching episodes of The Office. I now have a much cozier bedroom, with more floor space than I had before, and lots of trash for recycling next week. (We had trash delivery but no recycling pickup this week, because of Labor Day.) I’m also now caught up on the first two seasons of the show. (I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to watch this much of the US version. Thanks, Netflix Watch Instantly.)
Other than that, it was a slow day. My vacation is slowly drawing to its end. I heard from my parents this evening. They had a nice visit in Bath, will spend tomorrow morning seeing a few last things in London, and then get a flight home tomorrow evening. So this presumably will be the last night in a while that the dog will wake me up at 1 in the morning, convinced it’s a reasonable hour for him to walk and have breakfast.
And I managed to do a little writing tonight for a change. All my grandiose plans of writing each day, getting a lot read, getting caught up on Kaleidotrope slush, getting caught up on saved newsreader links…nope, none of that really came to pass.
There’s still the regular weekend, though, right? I don’t back to work for another two days.
Is the fact that I’ve been watching The Office, of all things, a sign that I’m ready to go back to my cubicle? I wonder.
The stories of today
This morning, my flash story, “Man on the Moon,” was published at 365 tomorrows. There’s a little question about the formatting — the underscores are meant to be italics and for all the dialogue — but overall I like the piece. It’s just under 300 words.
Then this afternoon, at my weekly writing group, I came up with this in our forty-minute free-writing time. We had this prompt, where one of us supplied a subject, the other a verb, and the third person an object. So we wound up with “tiger,” “swung,” and “shuriken.” And I wound up with this:
Tiger swung a shuriken at the large man standing in the doorway. He told himself he had intentionally missed.
But there was nothing to be done about it now, not with the flying star embedded in the door frame and the man’s fist about to be embedded in Tiger’s face. He was a mountain of a man, a hulking cliche of a henchman, every steroidal inch of him a goon through and through. The Jackal Brotherhood must grow these guys in vats, Tiger thought. Twenty tons for the price of one.
Tiger checked his pockets for an extra star, a weapon, anything. His only hope was to be quick on his feet, quicker than the goon, reflexes like a cat, pounce through the door and —
The man’s fist collided with Tiger’s chin.
My god did that hurt!
But the goon was going to have to be quicker if he planned to keep Tiger from —
And again. This time with the right side of Tiger’s face. He felt his teeth rattle, jar a little loose. He spat blood onto the dojo’s matted floor.
“Well that’s just rude,” he told the henchman. “Can’t a professional ninja try and kill a lackey without an unnecessary pummeling?”
He winced as the hulk of a man’s other fist swung into his gut.
“Was it the trying to kill you thing?” Tiger coughed. “That was just a joke, I promise.”
“Buddy,” the goon said, not yet even breaking a sweat, “you talk way too much.” He threw a kick at Tiger’s head. “And me killing you, that ain’t gonna be no joke.”
So Tiger had underestimated the goon. He could talk, for one thing. He might be little more than a thick wall of brute force and fists — which, even now, were acting like meat tenderizers against Tiger’s torso and lower body — but the Jackal Brotherhood hadn’t lobotomized him like they’d done so far with all the rest. Tiger must be getting closer. Jessica couldn’t be too far away now. If he could just get through that door…
“Your shoe’s untied,” Tiger said.
“Nice try,” the henchman said, knocking Tiger’s body to the floor. “But if you think I’m going to fall for that, you’re even dumber than you — ”
Tiger grabbed the laces, tugged, and, with his other arm, aimed an uppercut at the man’s unmentionables. If there was one thing ninja training taught you, it was to improvise.
The goon collapsed with a surprised oof, his fists now forgotten at his sides. The bigger they come, Tiger thought idly, getting to his feet. He tugged the shuriken free from the frame and raced out the door, leaving the muscle moaning behind him.
Now comes the hard part, he thought.
Other than that, it was just your typical Sunday around here.
Thursday various
- I like Doctor Who. I’m not sure I like it enough to have a A Doctor Who-themed wedding, though.
- Thomas Pynchon on plagiarism:
Writers are naturally drawn, chimpanzee-like, to the color and the music of this English idiom we are blessed to have inherited. When given the choice we will usually try to use the more vivid and tuneful among its words.
- A visual diary documenting a flight from New York to Berlin (with a layover in London). [via]
- You know, it is kind of funny that programs like Word still use a disk as the save icon when lots of computer users these days don’t even know what a disk is.
- And finally, even qwerty keyboards are falling by the wayside:
Like the “Enter†key that becomes a “Search†key, the self-leveling card deck may at first seem trivial. But it’s also a sly way that digital technology that uses real-world iconography destabilizes experience. What, after all, is a more recognizable symbol of the capriciousness of life than a deck of cards, out of which your fate is randomly dealt? And yet here the deck icon is only superficial. At heart it’s not a random-card generator but the opposite: a highly wrought program with a memory, an algorithm and a mandate to keep children in the game. An app posing as a spatiotemporal object.
As a populous commercial precinct, the Web now changes in response to our individual histories with it. Like a party that subtly reconfigures with each new guest, the Web now changes its ads, interfaces and greetings for almost every user. Some people find this eerie. But it’s nowhere near as shiver-worthy as the discovery that digital “things†— apps carefully dressed as objects — change as we use them, too. And it’s weird enough when those things are being solicitous and cooperative. What if the keyboards and decks of cards all turn on us? Let’s not think about that, not yet. [via]