I'm less than pleased about some trends in my net usage lately, including big chunks of what I've been doing on LJ. I'm gonna take a vacation from it - will still be reading friends' pages and commenting, but I don't expect to have any fresh posts here for a while, where "a while" will be as long as it turns out to be.

I'm doing this, I hope, before feeling completely overwhelmed, for those who wonder about such things, rather than responding to a sense of utter collapse after the fact.

PS: I will keep up with stuff like 100 Books and 100 Movies, and news of stories for those in the fiction filter, and like that.

Some of you may remember my my slide show of Quel'danas scenes, including the Dead Scar bombing area.

Well, here's a different angle on it, a more involved perspective, allowing more observation of the combatants.

So. I'm a noob.

My experienced raider is a healer, which means I've been motivated to learn about +healing and mana regen and the like. Set there. Rotorua is nobody's idea of a meleer, so I've sort of tuned out discussion of the nuances of high-end combat. But now Rosewither, my blood elf rogue, is in the zone where it matters.

Do any of you want to point me at an accessible primer kind of page for this stuff? I know some of it, but emphatically not systematically. By "accessible" I mean one that emphasizes prose and saves the detailed theorycrafting - like, I want to know more about what the categories themselves are before I go stare blankly at complex math.

Gonna take another run at this pbp thing with semi-official champions of the Russian Revolution.

One of the fun things about modern publishing technology and culture is the quiet little floods from obscure corners of things you - or at least I - would never think to look for on my own, but that turn up when browsing through aggregrators' and front ends' listings. Renaissance eBooks is a publisher like that, digging up old-school sf/f/h (and other genres) and listing them in storefront operations like Fictionwise, which is where I found this one.

The Citadel of Fear was known to me previously only as something mentioned in Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature". "Francis Stevens", the author, turns out to be quite an interesting person in her own right, and it's worth your checking out that link there - she'd be a good character in someone's historical novel. And now here's one of her novels.

This was a blast. I had so much fun reading it, a nibble at a time before bedtime, when up during the night, and in snippets during the day. If I'd known about it then, it would most certainly have gone onto the Adventure reading list. Two tough-guy treasure hunters stumble onto a lost city of the Aztecs in the southwestern desert, get taken prisoner, escape, don't quite make it out, skeptically scrutinize mystic phenomena, and get separated. Time passes. The survivor settles down and marries and goes on to a reasonably steady life, only to have all that he thought he'd left behind show up again with nasty sharp pointy teeth. The prose...okay, I'm not going to try to describe it. This is the opening:

"DON'T leave me-All-in--" The words were barely distinguishable, but the tall figure in the lead, striding heavily through the soft, impeding sand, heard the mutter of them and paused without turning. He stood with drooped head and shoulders, as if the oppression of the cruel, naked sun were an actual weight that pressed him earthward. His companion, plowing forward with an ultimate effort, sagged from the hips and fell face downward in the sand.

Apathetically the tall man looked at the twitching heap beside him. Then he raised his head and stared through a reddening film at the vast, encircling torture pen in which they both were trapped.

The sun, he thought, had grown monstrous and swallowed all the sky. No blue was anywhere. Brass above, soft, white-hot iron beneath, and all tinged to redness by the film of blood over sand-tormented eyes. Beyond a radius of thirty yards his vision blurred and ceased, but into that radius something flapped down and came tilting awkwardly across the sand, long wings half-spread, yellow head lowered, bold with an avid and loathsome curiosity.

"You!" whispered the man hoarsely, and shook one great, red fist at the thing. "You'll not get your dinner off me nor him while my one foot can follow the other!"

And with that he knelt down by the prostrate one, drew the limp arms about his own neck, bowed powerful shoulders to support the body, and heaved himself up again. Swaying, he stood for a moment with feet spread, then began a new and staggering progress. The king-vulture flapped lazily from his path and upward to renew its circling patience.

Which is to say that it's florid as all get-out, with some striking imagery along the way. Stevens has a lot of engaging similes. The pacing is also keen, and reminded me a lot of the original Dracula with its epic cliffhangers (literally, in some cases). There's a certain daredevil recklessness about the whole thing, partly just the freedom of working without an extensive genre history to set expectations, but partly (to judge from this and the part of another of her books I've read so far) a very theatrical sense of her own.

Another part of the pre-genre fun is the authorial sense of just how much you can mix and match. There's truth in the Aztec myths here, and that's no surprise, but there's also truth in other myths, in ways that are very much not like Moore/Gaiman syncretism or anything else that readily comes to hand now. The way the gods manifest in the extended showdown near the end just plain didn't remind me in detail of a whole lot else, and felt very fresh as well as very vivid to me.

Here be pulp! Highly recommended for those who like their adventure with a healthy dose of magic and horror.

Me, after ditching a particularly unsuccessful pick-up group: How does a paladin get to level 62 without knowing about Blessing of Salvation, anyway?

kali_magdalene: I have no answer to that, so I will instead show you a picture of a bunny with pancakes on its head.

A tip of the hat to aquamarcia for bringing that particular usage into our lives. Thanks, Chris.

Now this is nifty in the software department. Moody lets you tag music by color out of a 4x4 grid and then get a playlist of tracks tagged with that color, or any of those colors if you select several.

The underlying idea is that the 16 slots in the grid have whatever meaning you want to give them - they suggest sad to happy on the horizontal axis, and calm to intense on the vertical, but the designations are all in your hands. So it's a device for assembling a set of thematic playlists and calling them up again, simply.

Nifty!

This must be seen to be believed. Spontaneous animal play at its finest. Thanks to Teresa Nielsen Hayden for the link.

Wow. It's just plain a pleasant evening.

My Hordeside rogue went on the most amazingly smooth Karazhan run ever. We got a boss every half hour like clockwork, and had one partial wipe (accidental aggroing of ghosts in one of the balconies overlooking the opera stage) and two deaths in an accidental aggroing of patroling guards on the way to the Maiden of Virtue. And that was it. I ended up making out like a bandit, so to speak, on the loot, too. It was fun sharing the dawning recognition that we were in on something great, and working to keep it going.

I also got a bit of writerly pleasure out of my current reading, Scott Turow's 2005 novel Ordinary Heroes. The narrator's a recently retired reporter looking to find out more about his father, who's passed away just before the story begins. He says early on that he's intended to write a book but that it didn't quite work out, partly because, well, who really cares anymore about the decades-old story of the sensational death of an assistant prosecutor?

Physically, I'm hammered pretty badly, and mending slowly. But thanks to a lot of shared goodness, my mood is unimpeachably mellow. I'm having a great quiet day and actually am mending. Doesn't suck. :)

Thanks to tremendous help from family, friends, Safeway delivery people, Comcast technicians, neighbors, and WoW guildmates, I'm commencing to feel distinctly not so hammered. Next step will be rest for a few days and gradually resuming where I left off.

And thanks to kalluna for the coolest gardening link I've gotten all year.

No point at all in this for the rest of this week. I'll pick up when the effects of last night and today are all settled down.

One of the things that comes up sometimes in discussions of social services is how much those receive help should appreciate it. I was thinking a lot about that last night and this morning, and here's why....

About midnight, the power went out here. By 12:30 or so, the recorded announcements of outages known to the power company was updated to include one for an outage in the Ballard area affecting 11,000 customers. By then I had some candles on, and was thinking seriously about what I might need to do if the outage went on into the night. So many things to consider: extra stress relief supplements to take, worrying about perishables in the fridge and freezer, if I have to head out for a while what will I do with Montano, who might be available to take a call for some help well after midnight on Monday night/Tuesday morning, on and on. I felt so weak and frazzled, and above all, helpless and discouraged about not being able to just take basic care of myself the way most people of my age and background can.

The power came back on just before 1 am. Came back on on this side of 8th Avenue, at least; the whole of Phinney Ridge stayed dark. I got back online...and an hour later, my net connection went down. I've had a lot of trouble with it this month, and so didn't need it just then. I waited until 4 am or so, trying resets every so often, and finally put in a service call. It was gratifying to hear the tech working through steps and go from "oh, yeah, basic stuff" to "huh, wait, this is strange" to "okay, putting you on the service schedule as a high priority". After that I went to bed, the area east of me still blacked out.

Just a few minutes ago, I got up, chatted with the guy who used to live downstairs and is now in the other ground-floor apartment and petted his cats some, and reset the modem while I took out trash. It works. *shrug* It's nice to be back online again.

Now understand: I am deeply, deeply grateful to live in a part of the world that has this much of a working infrastructure, and of all those folks making it possible, like the people out at 1 am making my power come back on, and of all those I thought of among friends whom I know I could call on if I had to, and all the rest. I am glad to be secure in my home, and to know that I have good food and medicine and everything.

But it still sometimes just plain sucks a lot to be so vulnerable to fear and disorientation, to need so much help. It's not ingratitude, it's just the fatigue of needing so much. It would have been great to be able to just load up a few things and head out for a day without any worries, and then saddening to realize how far I am from ever doing that again.

Blogs:

Much the same as yesterday, plus Journalista, Dirk Deppey's amazing M-F roundup of news in the world of comics, graphic design, commercial illustration, animation, etc etc. This is one of my favorite reads each day, rich in links, usually containing some great wry commentary from Dirk, and almost always leading me to something I wouldn't have guessed I'd like to know about.

Stories:

Despite feeling awful, I got a good start on overhauling openings for "Noise" and "The Conservationist"/"Conserved Quantities", and realized that the latter of these can be much shorter than I originally figured without losing its effect. I may be getting the hang of this business of thinking of things that work at less than novel length. Five hundred words or so on each, and I'd like to finish one or the other by the weekend.

I'm really tired of getting mostly over this bug and then having it come back again, and having my naptime filled with nightmares [1] isn't helping.

1: For the curious: No, neither the recurring one haunting me last year nor (so nearly as I can tell) derived from Eli Roth inspirations.

It's very, very rare for me to delete a post, as opposed to a spam comment or one of a type I specifically declare I don't want to see attached to a particular post. But I've done it this evening.

Enough of my readers have convinced me that there's enough wrong with Yonmei's comments about Orson Scott Card and J.K. Rowling that I don't wish to keep supporting it with a link. So now I'm not.

Comments closed on this one; I'm just letting y'all know.

Day #1 of my effort to track weblog reading and my writing, with some comments on how I feel about (some of) the weblogs I look at.

Blogs:

Atrios, for a quick news check. Likely to stay in my RSS feed list because, first of all, Duncan Black is a master of the short entry and doesn't take much time and, second, he's often got the best link to news I do want in an election season.

Sean T. Collins: One of the weblogs that routinely leaves me feeling happier than when I started, and not just because he likes what I write. He's Ground Zero for my feeding of my interest in the world of horror, and throws in good comics rambling.

Crooked Timber: Not covering much of interest to me right now, but it's a window on the world very different than mine that sometimes teaches me a lot. At the moment, though, I'm discombobulated by a lot of academicians' reactions to the question of John Yoo's standing at UC Berkeley (of which a separate post sometime). Skimming via RSS feed and a check to see if anything intrested has broken out in the comments. It hasn't.

Obsidian Wings. I really should go to RSS only, ignoring everything but whatever Hilzoy and Katherine write and some of what Publius writes. The comment section has become largely contemptible, along with the other folks with posting privileges.

Balloon Juice. Banana Shoulders. Daring Fireball. Groklaw. Lust for Flowers. News From Me. Progressive Ruin. Savage Critic. Sideshow. Slacktivist. Unfogged. Unqualified Offerings. Various places for news about Making Light.

Story:

No writing of actual draft yet, but I'm poking at some possible scenes for "Noise" in my head, and re-reading M.R. James for ambience.

Also, seeing about a new regularly scheduled online gaming group.

Sometimes it takes a little public self-humiliation.

This next week I'm going to keep track of just what blogs I read, and just what I get written in the way of fiction and gaming. I hope to goad myself to reduce the one and increase the other.

After a week of not much, they're busy again downstairs. Lots of power equipment at work, and my particulate meter's been busy all afternoon. I hurt. I thought they were done with this general stage of things, and wish they were.

There's something I meant to touch on and forgot to, that both Hostel and the much weaker Hostel II do exactly right: they avoid exposition. One of the temptations for anyone making a story about people doing humane things is lecturing, to explain (hopefully at a dramatically suitable point) just how the principle of human evil is made manifest in this particular scheme. Roth doesn't do that, and it gives the work greater clarity. We see enough of how the "hunting lodge" works to give us a sense of what the protagonists are up against and nothing else. Is it native to Slovakia? How does the word get around? Etc etc? Dunno. Don't need to, either. The answers to questions like that would make the films into some other stories, and Roth seems much more interested in showing us how it affects the people it uses up than in explaining organization trees. And more power to him for it.

He's mentioned being interested in doing something PG-13, perhaps a giant monster movie, and if he could bring that same aesthetic to bear as Cloverfield did, this could be very interesting indeed to me.