Minnesota, I missed my flight. Hollywood, I felt I couldn't spare the trouble and time. But now there's a Pulp Shakespeare show in the New York Fringe — the first that doesn't require me to get on a plane — and this time nobody told me, let alone invited me. It's going on right now. I found out because people are joining the wiki again. So I bought a ticket for the Friday show.
It may be my fault for not answering when they asked me a while ago if I could somehow delete their script from the wiki page history so that they could better control their IP. I didn't really know what to say to that. I just knew that ignoring it would make my headache go away.
I could let the whole wiki be destroyed, because Wikispaces has decided, "to combat spam", that all existing public wikis now have to "authenticate" by giving them a dollar, and only through Google Wallet, please. I have my objections, but I felt the wiki ought to be saved, so now Google has my credit card information. I can only hope Google won't do anything obnoxious with it, considering that they love to make decisions for me and keep littering YouTube and Maps with ways to accidentally join G+. They may already be propagating my "real name" to everything. Time will tell.
Someone tore my map down from the front door. For now, I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt to the possibility that someone in the building may have had a legitimate objection to the information offered. But at the first sign of porlocks wanting to know where I am hiding apartment A, I'll put up another one.
The Tumblr ambigram gallery is live. I'm not quite sure at what pace I'll be loading it up with old stuff to keep people's attention. I'm going to be examining each old piece and asking myself whether I still like it, and if I can redo it better.
Writers, you may well feel unappreciated in fandoms, but consider this: You are nobody's performing monkey. People understand that you do your work privately in your own time, and perfect it with careful revision. Imagine if everyone who came up to your table at a convention, instead of buying your finished books, flipped through them to judge your talent and said, "So are you doing stories? I'd like a short story about my character, whom I will describe to you, and the plot is that he fights a cyborg army and falls in love with Galadriel. I normally wouldn't really think of commissioning such a thing, but what's valuable to me is the opportunity to make you write it right now while I stand here and watch you write it. Are you close to done? *sigh* I guess I can come back in twenty minutes."
Having no further appointments imminent, I resolved to push back into the nocturnal mode, because I want to be productive, and it's difficult to think in the constant megaheat when the sun is up. Naturally, this was when the world decided I needed to be put back into line. I woke to a ding-dong-ditch at 1 PM yesterday, then read an email telling me that the fire alarm system would be replaced and tested today, and I could expect to hear alarms going off all morning. I got a decent three-hour nap that evening, stayed up through the scheduled disturbance today, and went to sleep this afternoon when I was sure it was over. Two hours later (Why is it always two hours?), electric company slammers woke me with one of their sales calls. Not feeling super.
I got a workout yesterday trying to sort of clean my apartment, which was set back some by the thought that I should launder my old beanbag armchair because its fabric has gotten pretty grubby. I found, unfortunately, that there is no internal layer to remove the cover from; you just unzip it and there are loose Styrofoam curds and recycled foam chips. I tried scooping it all out and filled two kitchen trash bags before stopping to estimate that I would probably need to fill at least five more. I re-estimated the work/worth ratio and threw it away, and set to vacuuming up the static-charged bits that had gotten everywhere.
I still had laundry to do, and at the laundromat that night I saw an ad on the TV for a chain I hadn't gone to in a long time (Who could hang a name on them?) and a new menu item looked really good. For lack of any other suggestions, this made a success of today's birthday lunch with my parents, because that Asiago Peppercorn Sirloin was every bit as tasty as I hoped it would be, and perfectly done. Otherwise, the visit was uneventful, as we are creatures of habit to a fault.
Google has begun insisting that I want my Google searches to be in Portuguese, presumably because the email associated with my YouTube account was from .st (São Tomé and Príncipe, open to the world for novelty domains). I put my location into the account and changed the primary email on it to my Comcast address, but after doing so, Google.com still redirects to Portuguese, even if I sign out, or log in to my Gmail account, which is a different Google account. I never linked them together because I knew they would be using my info to make unsolicited decisions for me just like this one. Clearing my cookies fixes it, but logging into YouTube brings the Portuguese cookie back. If it annoys me too much, I just might have to scrap my YouTube account.
ETA: Either it fixed itself, or the changes I made needed time to take hold. *shrugpony*
Weighing the pros and cons of replacing my ambigram gallery with a Tumblr. The frame navigation really has to go, and it seems that instead of going to all the trouble to rewrite the site into something that is still a hassle to update, it would be better and easier to use an existing platform that is properly connected to the way people use the web now, i.e., following and reblogging and all that. (I still just go to websites and read them, but I'm old that way.) It would also finally reduce the website to a small list of links to other places and nothing actually there, which is kind of weird to me.
Also pondering whether I should submit something to a book spearheaded by ambigram.com. My feeling is that they've cheapened the art by establishing the general understanding that anyone who wants more than the instant results of Flipscript can get them to run a spec contest. In one of the unchecked hyperbolic assertions that I am starting to find typical of the site, Ambigrams Revealed (working title) is described as the "first time where ambigrams from international designers will be gathered in one publication", which I guess means I should remove Burkard Polster's Eye Twisters from my shelf before the smell of chopped liver gets into all the books. But they've got such luminaries as Scott Kim and John Langdon judging submissions for the book, and I get the feeling that my work might as well not exist if it's not in this thing. Having the right URL is enough to comprise the ultimate authority on something, it seems.
So. There was this commission I took on, to digitize two of someone else's old typeface designs, thinking it should only take about a month. He kept thinking of more and more things he wanted, and eventually it unfolded into a total of ten fonts, most with a substantial complement of alternate characters, and the last of which I pretty much had to design myself based only on a sample of the lowercase. It helped me learn some stuff about properly compiling, debugging, and finishing font files, but I got sick of the whole thing pretty quickly, to the point that I would (1) procrastinate on it often, because some days I just couldn't stand to look at it, and yet (2) increasingly resolve to avoid (a) any of my own projects and (b) any social contact whatsoever, because of the feeling that if I diverted brainpower to anything else, I would never be finished with this thing. My sleep patterns found every way to be unhelpful, naturally.
Even in the best of scenarios, again and again I find that working for anyone but myself is just a massive problem.
I have been in evidence on the internet, offering the odd comment or opinion, but mostly in places where I wouldn't expect anyone to know or care who I am. To be safe from any premature ideas of my being "back", I guess.
Remarkably enough, it has been a year to the day since I wrote, "I think the whole thing is finally off my hands." Now that at last it actually is, I sort of don't know where to begin with my proper life again, and am churning on The Everything Thing turned up to eleven. Updating my websites still seems to be contingent on teaching myself a few markup and programming languages. I probably need to dump a pile of documents into a big box and label it "desk 2012" so that I have a place to draw. Among the things I am discovering, of course, is that if I want to catch up with people, I'm going to have to see about signing onto some of the currently acceptable arbitrary platforms for writing words on the internet, because LJ has truly become cyber New Jersey at this point. It's Lew Jersey. And his boomerang fish act. That would make a decent first "tweet" I suppose. We'll have to see.
The perennial leak in the corner of my apartment, long thought unfixable, is fixed, as is the wall that took its abuse over the years.
( Before, During, AfterCollapse ) The wood section of the wall was rotten all the way through, and yes, there's some sky showing through there.
So this was my week: Slamming my sleep pattern, which really didn't want to be where it needed to be, just so I could be there all day while the workers did their thing. Sitting at my computer and trying to look busy while not really having the brainpower to get work done. It reminded me a lot of what it was like to go to a legitimate workplace, and I know normal people do it every day, but I wonder how I had ever managed it at all.
