Curse of the Day:
¤ May your spare computer remain underutilized.

Word of the Moment:
¤ Word: Janky (adj)
¤ Usage: "That movie sucked.  It was hella-janky."
¤ Synonyms: Crappy, inadequate, lame.
¤ Deviations: Jankalicious, jankitude. Fequently paired with "hella".
¤ Origin: Unknown/pop culture.  Malaya was using it regularly when I moved up here in mid-July and I'd heard it before, but hadn't really incorporated it into my vocabulary until hearing her use it frequently.
¤ Notes: Currently in heavy rotation, frequently used for comedic effect. Can be made to fit virtually all situations. -- August 5, 2003

I'm not having time/inclination to blog every day anymore, and I'm annoyed at missing random days two or three times a week. So rather than keep on with the "updating most of the time, or not" schedule, I'm creating one.

From now on I'll be blogging every Mon, Tues, Thur, Fri, and Sat.  I.E. no new blog on Wednesdays or Sundays, but five new ones each week, and on days you can count on.  In theory I'll be writing stuff whenever the mood strikes me, as well as when there is a deadline of sorts for one of the five action days, and if it's a Tuesday or Saturday and I know I'm not posting it for the next day, I'll just save it for the day after that.

I will also make an effort to get them posted nearer midnight, since Malaya and I are making an effort to get to bed earlier, go to bed together, and we like to do things other than sit across the living room from each other, typing away, for the last hours of the night every night. Or more like me typing while she reads or watches TV and yawns a lot, waiting around for me to hurry up and blog so she can go to bed and snuggle with Fluxypoo before sleeping.

There's nothing to stop me from actually writing these before 3am, I don't suppose. I've just never tried it.

There's also a new feature on the daily-updated nav bar items.  This one is only going to be updated weekly (or so) and it's one that Malaya has been popping on her own blog as well, so maybe she'll take it over.  Also, the wording may change.  Anyway, for now it's "word/phrase of the moment" and it's a phrase or word that Malaya and/or I are currently beating to death in our private conversation. I.E. talking to each other.  Expect to see a new word/phrase regularly, with some short explanation and suggested usage each time. Or at least until I get sick of it, or we stop making up new catch phrases.

There will likely be an archive page for these as well, once I've run enough of them to bother setting one up.

As I said above, the WinXP issues continue. Here are a couple of recent mails about it.

I read your latest blog about XP and wanted to share my experience with you. I did the upgrade to XP on my win 98 machine. It worked. However, not one of my old programs from Adobe would work. Likewise for Corel WordPerfect. I had trouble with any software that was not MS in origination and I got it that you buy XP so more software can be sold and more money made for the corporate pigs. I went back to 98 and am happy as a pig in the mud.
--Glenn

I'm a long time site reader, and I thought I'd share my XP Pro install experience with you. I had a problem similar to yours with the install, and I even bought a new hard drive to try to fix it. Turns out that the IDE controller and/or driver was not compatible with the installer, alas. It is likely this was due to the age of the motherboard (even though it was within MS specs). You might want to try messing with some bios settings...goodluck.
--Jason

So, good news all around there, eh?

The current state of affairs is that there's just no way to get WinXP to install on my old machine. I'm leaning towards Jason's explanation, that it's some piece of hardware that just won't work with it.  Whenever we try to install WinXP on the 2nd machine, it locks up almost immediately one it gets to the actual install step (the whole copying files and scanning your system stuff works fine), at about 3%, and says something to the tune of: "There is a fatal corruption error in the C drive, and Windows XP can not be installed."

This happens if we try the upgrade install, or the full install, and the C drive is fine, it runs Win98 and has been defraged and error checked, etc.  I put in my spare D drive from this main machine and tried it, and it would give the same error when trying to install it to the D drive also.  Same "C drive fatal corruption" thing, when it shouldn't even be writing to or from the C drive at that point.

And I can even install XP on the D drive when it's in this machine, and put that drive into the older one.  If I try to boot with that drive, it just locks up in the text start up, saying "remove system disk and hit any key to continue".  And if I set it to the slave drive and boot from the old win98 drive, it'll boot up and the D drive comes up fine on explorer, shows all the folders and files, can write to and from it, etc.  There's just no way to actually run WinXP on the machine.

So I'm taking the lame way out and asking Dad to mail me his copy of Win98, which is what we really should have gotten in the first place, like a week ago, when the problems first began.  Once we've repaired the Win98 install on the old machine (the resources are all screwed up and can't allocate since Malaya tried to hook up her zip drive to it so we can't get the 3d card to work and the whole system profiles tab has exclamation points on almost everything and they can't be removed even by reinstalling the appropriate drivers) I'll try one more time to install XP, and if it doesn't work (which we expect it won't) I'll just take it back to Fry's, and at least we'll get our $108 back.  Malaya just hates win98, or we would have already given up and taken XP back to the hell from which it spawned.

Speaking of hells and spawning:

¤ Check out this Dante's Inferno Test to see what level of hell you are destined for.  Malaya saw the link first and took the test and was bummed to only reach the Third Circle.  Pfft! That's hardly out of Purgatory, FFS.  I took it an hour later and was gratified to see that my life has spiraled downwards sufficiently to achieve the Sixth Circle, adding my doleful sighs to the chorus of burning heretics.

I scored "very high" on every level from 3 on down, but got an "extreme" on Level Six, which I guess is why I'm assigned there for all eternity.  It's a respectably-grim fate, but still, I can't really be satisfied with failing to achieve at least the Eighth Circle, though I can probably only dream about dropping all the way down to the Ninth and being eternally encased in ice, my glazed eyes staring up through the crust to view Brutus, Judas, and Cassius serving in their eternal role as Satanpops.

As for the test, I like that there is no Heaven as a result.  At best you can hope for Purgatory, from which you may work for several thousand years to attempt to scale the mountain towards heaven.

What makes me think is that we all (I assume) take this for amusement and jollies and give it no thought at all.  Yet there must be someone out there who takes it and views their results with dismay. "Oh my God, the Fourth Circle!  I'm going to Hell!  I must repent and grow more virtuous!" Not that I'm saying anyone really believes in Dante's Mythology or organization of Hell, but I assume some wanna-be devout people view this as a guideline to try and improve their personal behavior.  And I suppose that's not an entirely bad idea, though I see tests and Biblical sort of quizzes as so out-dated and picky that they are worthless in terms of evaluating a person's real morality or worth.

A real evaluation of that sort of thing requires paint store worth of shades of gray, and an infinitively-nuanced situational relativity gauge. Let's all just hope that if there really is a Heaven, St. Peter's got one, eh?

¤ For another quick click thingie that Malaya pointed me to, try this one.  It gives you a vampire name.  No, I don't have any idea if they are actual historical figures or what, and no, it's not interesting for very long.  But hey, it was free.  And as a special bonus for all the people who get way too into the whole Dracula/Vampire thing, here is a past quote of the day to ponder.

¤ The baffling part of this [Goth wannabe vampires doing what they do] is that the modern "vampires" are claiming kinship not with the vampire that our ancestors actually believed in, but with the fictional vampire derived from that one. This is like somebody claiming to be related to Rhett Butler in the movie Gone with the Wind. "You mean Clark Gable," you say. "No, no: Rhett Butler. You know, the character in the movie. He's my cousin."
-- Paul Barber

However as time passed and we saw most of the other movies we had interest in seeing, LXG continued to look somewhat interesting.  Once I saw Tomb Raider 2, which most of the critics went out of their way to hate, but that I thought was actually pretty good, I had to reconsider LXG.  And while checking out the new trailers on the Quicktime site, I saw that there were four newly-added clips of LXG.  I gave one a try, thought it was good, and ended up watching all four, and I think they all look pretty good.  Certainly better than the mediocre film trailer looks, anyway.

Malaya thought they looked pretty good too, which is how we found ourselves on Monday afternoon, in line at an 18 movieplex near Oakland. Where we proceeded to see... The Italian Job.

Yes, we went to see LXG, but while in the very slow line we had ample time to peruse the other movies showing, and Malaya fixed upon The Italian Job and asked why I didn't want to see it. I did want to see it, and had considered going myself months ago when it opened, and wondered in turn why she didn't want to see it.  I'd asked her about it in the past and she had said no way.  She denied that and said that I'd said I didn't want to see it, and that she was quite interested in it herself.

This went on for another 30 seconds, until we were both wondering about the other's sanity, or possibly evil identical twin. We then turned the conversation to our desire to see LXG, and when we both avowed to be equally-interested in each picture, I grabbed a dime to flip. She said "Heads for Italian Job." and I pointed out that we'd said "head for T3" last time, so should switch it so heads wasn't always anti-LXG.  She said whatever, so I flipped "heads for LXG."

It was tails.

And it was a pretty good movie.  I'll write a short review about it some day.  But not today.

After the movie we walked around the Barnes and Noble next to the theater, and ended up in their DVD section.  They have amazingly-overpriced DVDs galore, and are trying to get $30 for almost everything new. Considering that Price Club offers virtually every new movie for around $19, and all the other department stores like Target and WalMart and others have selected new movies for $15 or $20, I don't think Barnes/Noble sell a lot of DVDs.

However they did have a pretty-good selection of used ones for marked down prices, and we got three movies for around $20 each.  Conan the Barbarian, The Rock, and Eat Drink Man Woman.  Malaya has been jonesing for The Rock for weeks, for some reason.  I'd never seen it, and lacking anything better to do upon our return from the movie, she threw it in and I got interested and sat down next to her, mostly to snuggle, and for two hours we were relatively entertained by it.

I had never seen it, but could remember the whole critical frenzy at the time, since it was one of the first of the hyper-stylized overly-edited Bruckheimer movies, and it divided critics back in 1996.  Of course just about every movie has 5 cuts a second now, but at the time it was like the most hyperactive eye candy ever, and people complained about being made carsick by it, and getting eye strain and headaches from the way it was edited.

The whole "new depths in short attention span action crap" thing overshadowed any potential good/bad movie debate at the time, and that was half the reason I wanted to see it now, at last, just to see how frantic it really was.  I found it reasonable watchable, and only noticed the ridiculous editing during an early car chase, when there is not one single long shot of anything; every single view is looking steeply up or down, no camera view holds for more than half a second, most of them are moving wildly in one direction or another or tilting or flying back from explosions, etc.

I personally found it annoying and off-putting, where the craft became so much more visible than the substance that all I could do was be amused at how they were chopping the scene up. It was like they had a ton of footage, but none of it looked very good, so they had to blender edit it to try and create false excitement.  You know, like how they overedit fight scenes when the actors really can't fight at all (see any Steven Segal movie) and all you see are the backs of people being hit by punches you never clearly see thrown.

I don't think that was the case, it was probably a reasonably-coherent action scene with plenty of budget and fire and amazing, flying trolley cars, but they way they chose to chop up the editing you could hardly tell.

I also remembered hearing critics complain about the vastly-overused faux military music, and I noticed that and got tired of it also.  They had one piece written for the movie, and they must have played it 50x, and in about ten different ways.  Slow and melancholy when the mood demanded it, fast and hard when there was a fight, in a different pitch for a sadder scene, etc.

Anyway, I'll probably write more about that movie sometime in the future. But not today.

After some dinner we started to watch Conan, mostly wanting to get to the immortal Chinese dinner speech, which I had recited from memory in the car, thusly sending Malaya into gales of hysteria.

Chinese Warlord: "Conan!  What is best in life?"

Conan: "To crush your enemies.  To see them driven before you.  To hear the lamentation of the women."

It's nothing in print, you really have to hear it in the whole robotic, heavily-accented, almost-incomprehensible Ah-nold delivery to truly appreciate it. 

"Due crutch yaw enuhmees, due zee dem drippen befaw you, due ear de lamendashun of de wimpunz."

And yes, I do a passable Arnie impersonation. At least I think so, and it's good enough to crack Malaya up, anyway. The DVD version of Conan has a few added scenes throughout the film, most notably to the very ending, and will make a decent blog topic some day. But not today.

What I am going to talk about today, albeit briefly, is a book.

As Malaya discussed in her blog last week, the latest Jean Aeul novel in her Children of the Earth series is called Shelters of Stone. And as Malaya discussed, it was a 12-year wait for it for loyal fans of the series (mostly fans of the first two books, which were very good, and not the 3rd and 4th, which sucked). A dozen year wait that turned very ugly, since the book is a train wreck.

It's not like people just don't like how the story went, or how it was written, or like the author killed off a favorite character.  People actively hate it, on many levels.

I had read the first two novels in the series many years ago, I'm talking decades.  Like in the 80's.  And thought they were pretty good, but nothing exceptional.  Mostly memorable for me for the very graphic sex that happened a lot; I can remember practically every girl in my junior high school carrying around a copy of Valley of the Horses for about 3 years straight, and I've always been pretty sure that it was for the very hot and very lovingly-detailed sex it contained.

Or perhaps that was all the 13 y/o Flux got out of the story, which is basically a historical fiction soap opera.  I've seen how much one's personality affects what you get out of a book a lot recently, when discussing favorite books and series of my youth with Malaya.  I'm four years older than her, but we both read a lot of the same books and saw the same movies in our formative years, and it's funny to me how differently we remember things. Stuff that I remember for the action and violence and sex she'll remember for the romance or relationships.  And when she talks about it I can vaguely recall the elements she's talking about, but they are almost never anything I noticed at the time, or if I noticed them they meant nothing to me.  It's almost like we read different versions of the same stories, but it wasn't the stories that were different -- it was the brains that were processing them.

As for Shelters of Stone, I heard Malaya groaning at it while she tried to read it and skimmed frantically ahead.  I read numerous of the painfully-upset fan reviews on Amazon.com.  And I believed all of them, and didn't have any hope that the novel would actually be any good, but at the same time, I had trouble believing it was really that bad. So I gave it a try.

The book begins with about a 10 page acknowledgements section, which I strongly-recommend you skip entirely.  I tried to read it, curious about her scientific thanks to all of the doctors and archeologists who helped her build up the information about early man that she uses in the stories.  She is very thankful and sincere, but also very boring and far too detailed and thorough.  The effort is entirely on presenting the information the author wants to present, with no consideration as to whether or not the reader needs all that info, nor on how to make the info that must be delivered interesting.  This is a theme that continues through the 900 pages of the book.

The very first page of the actual story was enough to almost make me give up.

True, I'm far more picky about the actual prose and word-arrangement and writing quality/style than 99% of readers, but I think almost anyone with an ear for writing or an eye for quality would have problems with the very low writing quality she exhibits, and right on page one.  Perhaps every page in a book can't be scintillating prose, but come on, page one? That's the one page that simply must be good and well-polished, since that's the first thing most readers see, and it needs to start off with a bang, as well as be involving and welcoming.  Page one of Shelters of Stone is none of these.

It starts off like the middle of a chapter, or even a paragraph, with no introduction or hook, and the writing used on that page is as bad as any in the book.  I'm not going to count it now, but as I read it I noted that at least 95% of the sentences were the simplest "subject - verb" arrangement possible.  Okay, I'll go look for a minute.

In order:

• People were
• No one made
• The young woman
• She watched
• She had
• It's not just that
• The tall man
• He was
• He turned
• He seems
• She nodded
• In addition
• She was
• Ayla held
• She considered
• That throng

Okay, it's even worse than "subject - verb". It's like there was a sale on "pronoun - verb" and Jean M. Auel was buying.

This isn't technically incorrect or anything, it's just a very low level of writing, and grates on the ear with the perpetual sameness of it all.  Varying sentence structure and layout to keep things flowing and sounding fresh to the reader isn't the first lesson in a creative writing class; it's simply common sense.  I would find it impossible to issue something like this; even when I'm writing something in the very roughest rough draft I consciously vary my sentence structure, if I for some reason find myself falling into such a simple rut of repetition. It bothers me to hear it in my head as I write it; much less thinking about how lame it will look to a reader.

Anyway, I got past page one, eventually, and tried to move on.  I've read poorly-written stories in the past, and I can look past the bad writing if the story is interesting, the characters fascinate me, the world they inhabit is fun, there is good action and/or sex, and so on.  I hoped I'd get into the story of SoS, and be able to ignore the unedited prose.

But once I got past the repetitious sentence structure and amateurish word arrangement, it just became boring.  Starting just a couple of pages in is the first huge block of long, boring, formal introductions.  I suppose that some people really care enough about the story to read the whole,

"Joharran, this is Ayla of the Mamutoi, Member of the Lion Camp, Daughter of the Mammoth Hearth, Chosen by the Spirit of the Cave Lion, and Protected by the Cave Bear."

"In the name of the Doni, the Great Earth Mother, I welcome you, Alaya of the Mamutoi, Dauther of the Mammoth hearth," he said.

stuff.

I can't stand those sorts of things myself, in real life or in novels, and I just glaze over at the first hint of long titles and names.  It's fine once in a while, and probably necessary the first time a character is introduced, but literally the entire page 6 is this, with four-paragraph introduction to the concept of formal introductions that I can't seriously believe any intelligent reader couldn't have figured out for themselves.  And according to Malaya and countless other reviewers, this sort of thing goes on for the entire novel.  Just page after page of long, long, long, boring cut and paste formal introductions.  No one has any idea why Aeul didn't just start saying, "Ayla gave a formal introduction to...", rather than writing out the whole thing once again.

Maybe the author just figured out how to use a word processing program (remember, it's been 12 years since the last book in the series) and she was literally so enamored of the ease with which she could paste in paragraphs that she never stopped to realize how boring they would be for readers to plow through every single time.

Just death.  Death.  As Malaya likes to say.

Once you get past the whole formal introductions stuff, you start to get to the thing that I'm currently hung up on.  It's another sort of "how not to write a book" example, though in this case it's a good example of how not to write any sort of fiction, be it short story, novella, or novel.

What Auel does is want to give out a bunch of information quickly, and wants to describe subtle emotional states, but she lacks the skill or tact or patience to do that through the writing, so instead of working it in over time she just plops it down in a huge chunk, mostly through the thoughts of a character.  So someone will say something, and then the next three paragraphs describe their thought processes in the most ridiculously detailed way.  And every character does this.

If just one or two did it, you could buy that okay, that's a super thoughtful character and they really analyze their own thoughts, as well as seeing into the actions of others.  But when everyone does it, up to and possibly including the animals, it just becomes a bad author crutch.

There's a scene on about page 20 where Jon talks to his old lover Zol who is now sort of the queen of the tribe, and then his new lover Ayla walks in.

In a nutshell:

• Zol realizes from a glance at Jon while Jon is speaking about Ayla that Jon is really and truly madly in love with her, and this is a bad thing to Zol since it means that Ayla can actually hurt Jon since he's vulnerable to her.
• Jon realizes this from looking into Zol's eyes, and realizes that he must convince her that Ayla is deserving of his true love since he wants Zol and Ayla to get along and also since Zol is a powerful woman in the tribe.
• Ayla then walks in and sees them together talking and instantly realizes that Zol is a powerful woman who is somewhat suspicious of her and worried about Jon, and Ayla further realizes that Zol must not only be a past love and lover of Jon, but one who was his first lover and teacher, and therefore Ayla knows she must make a good impression, but she also realizes that Zol is super smart and able to see into people so Ayla knows that she must be honest and insightful and not just smile fakely.
• Fortunately Ayla, at a glance, realizes the entire back history of Zol and Jon, and she immediately thanks Zol for teaching Jon so well in sexual and love matters and for letting him go free even though she loved him since that enabled Ayla to meet Jon years later and fall in love with him.
• And as Ayla says this Zol realizes how insightful Ayla and that she sees the whole situation and not just part of it, and that therefore Ayla is worthy of Jon's love.

Of course the book takes like six pages to get all this tortuous detail out, and presents it with almost as little subtlety as I just did.  It's just plopped down on the page and you are supposed to read it and accept the nearly telepathic mental connections as near-godlike perception of these people, and go on from there.

Now obviously this is a very complicated relationship and the characters have enough depth that you need to know all of this about them, and that's a good thing, but the way it's just 2x4 exposition'ed down on the table is unacceptable.  This would be sent back for a total rewrite by any editor working today, and only allowed in if the rest of the novel was so good or long that reworking this minor thing into the complicated scene that it would require to present competently was just out of the question.

And this is anything but an isolated event.  Virtually every conversation or character interaction is like this, with one or both characters always sending up a few paragraphs of psych journal-worthy insight or analysis, either of themselves or the person they have just met.  It's informative, but absurd, and reads nothing like real life. And the problem with that is that you are immediately taken out of the book, since you can't help but realize you are reading as you wonder, "Who the hell thinks like this character is thinking?"  You have to constantly make conscious decisions to ignore some dreadful writing, or some awful authorial mistake in how information and dialogue is presented, if you're to continue with the novel.

I'm only on page 30 and I've had to stop in disgust 4 or 5 times already.  I can't imagine I'll get more than 100 or so pages in, and then possibly skip to the ending just to see if there is anything interesting there.

By all reports Aeul just refuses to allow an editor to fix up her writing for her, and I guess that's a perk that comes with success, but it's really killed her writing quality. And it's not like an editor just fiddles around to improve your wording, they insist upon major changes so your bloated and redundant 900 page disappointment of a 5th novel becomes a streamlined 600 page bore.  No editor can create an interesting plot for you, and there is no real plot or conflict at all in Shelters of Stone, but an editor can at least trim some of the fat from the meat of the novel, and help readers keep moving.

When hundreds of devoted fans take the time to write about how greatly-disappointed they were with your latest work, a book most of them waited 12 years for, it's a pretty clear sign that you've issued a disaster of a novel.   And I feel sorry for them.

It does give me motivation to write my own novels though, and resolve to never start sucking this hard in the middle of a series, thus letting down all of my long-time fans, not to mention killing off my career.

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