hello friends

I had no idea this was online. Maybe the Baen people only put it up recently.

A Logic Named Joe (click "Next" if you want to skip the bio) -- sci-fi story by one "Murray Leinster", about the Internet. Written in 1946. I have touted this story, and this author, before, but now no hunting down of dead trees is required.

First bit: It was on the third day of August that Joe come off the assembly line, and on the fifth Laurine come into town, an' that afternoon I saved civilization. That's what I figure, anyhow.

I don't think I've read any of the other stories in that collection besides The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator (which involves an unusually amiable kangaroo named Arthur), so this is just hardcore awesome all around.



(If anyone wants a more personal update, just go back and read the last few ones I did. Nothing really much changes -- I am trapped in a nightmare that doesn't end, where I am mocked by having lots of other things act like they might finally start to go right, while the one thing I wanted most dearly is now forever out of my reach. And my last words in this life to the man I loved so much that it hurt are still "eight pixels is not that much".

Reading things online is much more exciting.)

Inspired by the old comic projects I found and posted links to in my last entry, I just dug up and scanned a project I did for a class in October 2003. It was the history-of-comic-books class mecha and I took; we had to take a well-known story and script it as a 2-3 page comic. We could draw it if we wanted, but all that was required was the script. Naturally, I drew my retelling of that classic fable "The Honest Woodcutter." Also naturally, my retelling goes off in a completely bizarre direction.

Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3.

Presented in worst-scan-ever-o-vision, because what I actually scanned was stapled-together pieces of tracing paper that had been folded in half for three years.

I also did this for the same class, but it's less amusing.

Enjoy.

Back in earlyish 2000, my friend Becky and I were bored. We were bored and online and sitting in a MUX, which is basically a text-based universe that can be used for chat, immersive roleplaying, or anything in between. We were bored in the MUX and I had this crazy little webcomic about a girl and her snail, so we decided to post a blurb on the comic site, asking readers to come in and play with us.

We got a few folks trickling in... not sure how many, but probably not more than six. Only a couple stayed around for very long, though, and over the years we all sort of vaguely stayed in the same circle of mutualish e-friends. One of those fellows was vxo, radio-obsessed urban-exploring human lightning rod extraordinaire. The other was chrisxk.

I have been informed tonight that Chris died early last month. There's an obit here, though you may have to use bugmenot.com to actually get at it; basically on November 7th he was found dead. His brother says that the doctor types couldn't find a reason, and so they chalked it up to Chris just dying in his sleep. At the age of 22. What the hell, universe.

Now, I knew that Chris had disappeared off the Internet, but I wasn't actually all that concerned for a while. People just sometimes lose connectivity... hell, mecha and I lost it for like a month and a half when we forgot to pay that Comcast bill, and if I hadn't been a paid LJ user and/or had access to mechamom's apartment with its crappy dialup, I would've been e-silent for all that time. So I figured he would show up again eventually, and that maybe in another few weeks I would investigate, but not yet. Then someone contacted me on his AIM name while I was asleep and left without saying anything useful. That sort of piqued my concern, so I got ahold of Ken, his best meatspace friend, who got ahold of his (Chris's) brother on DeviantArt, who delivered the bad news. And then there's that obit, which seems to seal the deal. Chris is dead.

It was all very low-key, but I know that a couple of you knew that Chris and I were involved. Dating. Something. Whatever you call it when for most of it you're separated by a timezone or three. He asked me once if I would marry him, and I said yes. This Christmas would have been our anniversary. There is a very snarky, very angry part of me that is basically saying "congratulations everyone who said that an online relationship would never last; turns out you were right". The rest of me just wishes it could have not-lasted in a way that resulted in his still being alive and happy somewhere in the world, whether or not I was still involved.

I've taken about three hours to write this post, mainly because it's hard to write so I keep going off and doing other things instead. After Ken pasted me what Chris's brother wrote, I was kind of calm and numb about the whole thing, but the numbness is starting to wear off, possibly in part because I'm extremely tired. Probably mainly because I'm going to have some grievin' to get on. There is a Chris-shaped hole inside me right about now, and it's never going to be filled; everything's just going to have to kind of be rerouted around it. So it goes.

Goodbye, Chris. Rest in peace; as much as I love you, I'll still be forced to headshot you if you come back as a zombie.

[00:42:05] d**************u: I know what kage, ho, kaze, and a bunch of other words mean.
[...]
[00:46:19] The Jennybork: I KNOW WHAT 'HO' MEANS TOO
[00:46:24] d**************u: What?
[00:46:41] The Jennybork: IT'S THE THING THE PIMP SMACKS AROUND
[00:46:46] The Jennybork: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
[00:46:51] d**************u: No.
[00:46:54] d**************u: It means 'fire'.
[00:47:04] The Jennybork: SET HER ON FIRE IF YOU REALLY WANT I GUESS
[00:47:09] The Jennybork: THAT'S FIFTY BUCKS EXTRA THOUGH
[00:47:13] The Jennybork: Ohh, I'm going to hell.

I also got to reference this, which is seriously one of the best xkcd comics ever. I love you, Randall Munroe. Have my non-raptor babies.

Finally, a letter.

Dear Approximately Half Of Virginia:

What the fuck. No, seriously, WHAT THE FUCK.

If there were any justice in the world, tomorrow you would all wake up with deer heads stuffed in your mailboxes. Every single one.

Hate,
Jenny.

That's about it.

So. Um.

I am reading World War Z by Max Brooks, the same guy who wrote the Zombie Survival Guide. It's good. A series of "oral accounts" of fictional survivors of the great worldwide zombie outbreak. I'm not even a quarter in yet and already he's brought up all sorts of interesting things that probably WOULD happen in a zombie plague scenario, but that I never even imagined myself (even though I think more about zombies than is probably healthy). Like: what happens to the organ transplant business?

I am also playing City of Heroes (on Victory, if anyone out there is still playing a MMO that isn't World of Warcraft). I got a free two-week acount to mess around in it a bit with a friend, and then mecha got his own free account, and the two of us realized that we both liked it a lot. So for a little while, anyway, we're going to keep playing. Went out and bought two copies of the Good Versus Evil edition and everything. Of course, we had to hit SEVEN STORES before FINALLY finding them in stock at WAL*MART of all places. But.

I am also also in love with this video, which is a pairs skating adaptation of the Million Ways dance. I used to love watching figure skating when I was younger, and then it started getting really boring because really all the skaters do basically the same thing over and over again, with a few exceptions. These two have made it interesting again, at least for the span of four minutes.

I am also also also generally feeling a bit better about stuff than I was a month or two ago. Part of this is because we are getting a handle on the whole going-back-to-school thing. We should be getting our financial aid packages in soon, and there should be enough money to survive on; we'll be getting our old bursar bills paid soon and then we should be able to actually register for classes; and, perhaps nicest of all, we've secured what looks to be a very clean and quiet two-bedroom two-bath apartment that is on a bus route to campus and is affordable. Probably the last one of those left in Bloomington. Ours now, suckas!

Oh, and I've also started taking a daily vitamin, which is just a good idea anyway, plus if I was sad and listless because of any deficiencies then not so much any more. "Deficiencies" does not look like a real word. Maybe I spelled it wrong.

So that's about it until the next time I post, which will probably be in, like, five years. Or not. Either way.

PS: Mike's Halloween costume fills my heart with malicious glee. (He is the guy in the first three pictures!)

I keep forgetting that LJ exists until I go to upload something to the scrapbook. Case in point: my new avatar for the YPP forums.



The drawing actually continues almost to the legs, but when I resized it to 150 pixels it looked like yuck, and thus the upper-body shot. ph33r the cute, though. Oh, how very much ph33ring is necessary.

This is neat and somehow a little sad. Because no matter how hard you try, you CAN'T stop that arrow, not really. You can only pretend to.

This is a pretty funny clip from Spaced, a British sitcom which features the guy who was Shaun in Shaun of the Dead.

This makes me hate Straub all the more for being able to make with the pretty words and pictures when I cannot. Haaaate.

This is me posting a lot of links and not much actual content. Doot de doo.

Yeah.

Okay, thanks to rsspect.com, fp now has its own RSS feed. I've long since tired of having to remember to give update notices in my LJ here, but I'd no idea how the hell to code a proper RSS feed. Sure, I could easily have reuploaded an xml file at update time every Monday and Friday, but that is kind of missing the point of automation.

Of course, setting up the fp script to work with rsspect has given me some idea how I could code my own, but such are the ironies of life.

At any rate, if you're at all interested in Four Panels then you should add fourpanelsfeed to your friends list, or http://rsspect.com/rss/fourpanels.xml to your favorite RSS reader. I'll do manual announces of the next few reviews, and include a link to the feed there too, because I know what it is to be lazy. But after that, if you're not reading the RSS feed, you will be so damn out of the know.

Shifting topics, today would be my birthday. I have reached my first quarter-century. I think that means I'm old or something? Or maybe that's 30. I don't know any cool young kids to ask and make sure. Either way, when I was in high school, I figured that by 25 I'd be graduated from college and teaching somewhere. Instead I am currently waiting in a bizarre limbo state to see if and when IU will get off its ass and give me my financial aid and stuff so I can go back to trying for the sixth or seventh year to finally finish a damn degree. Six if you count years I actually was going to classes full-time, seven if you count calendar years. Jesus. It's depressing.

But! I don't need to think about that now especially since there is literally nothing I can do, up to and including getting my advisor to even answer my emails. So let's shift topics again to kittens.

The thing about kittens? Is they are awesome.

Puppies are acceptable too.

Finally, for anyone who has seen or will seen X3 (spoiler-free): http://dieselsweeties.com/archive.php?s=1496

So I wrote a little fanmail to Jeffrey Rowland, because I was feeling especially aware of his awesomeness and wanted to congratulate him on it. I didn't really expect a reply, but he did send one, and it made me laugh so I'm posting it here.

Thank you Jenny! Thanks for helping the dream come alive and crawl out of the well with its hair hanging over its face!

HOW CAN YOU BEAT THAT FOR A REPLY.

You cannot. That is how.

Today's review: Doom

Also, I just read Anansi Boys. It was, naturally, insanely fuckin' good. Neil Gaiman, I hate you for being so awesome, and will kill you and eat your brains in order to gain your powers. Just you wait.

SNAKES ON A PLANE TRAILER

MAN, but I can't wait until this movie comes out.