I feel vaguely guilty when I let Tachyon City sit fallow because I suspect that some out there might panic and assume I’m had another stroke. I haven’t.  What I’ve had has simply been a heaping helping of life.

Starting last week in preparation for the beginning of school this week, I moved my alarm from 5:30am to 5am so I’d have at least a few minutes with my kids before I leave for the train station.  (We read the scriptures every morning.  Isn’t that charmingly godbotherish of me?)  However, not being 29 anymore — and being even more distinctly non-29 since my stroke in February — every deficit of sleep must be made up somewhere else in the schedule; the budget must be balanced. So I’ve been going to bed a little earlier, usually between 10pm and 11pm.  (It’s a novelty for Michele; I actually come to bed before she’s already asleep!)

Then, you may have heard, I’ve started a magazine.  Yes, I am insane; in those scattered moments when I’m not critically aware of the finite number of hours in a day, I’m siezed by the delusion that I’ve got tons of spare time, so I start these new projects.  I’ve been reading the slush pile (which is quite prodigious for a penny-a-word PDF weird fiction magazine that’s been promoted at maybe half a dozen websites), getting contracts out to writers, hunting up cover artists and potential advertisers…  It’s not more time-consuming than I thought; I just made all of my plans during one of those delusional phases.

Oh, and I’m still working on the house during the Saturday hours that someone else doesn’t have claim to, putting up trim and caulking and puttying and (eventuall) painting.

All of which means that the free-form non-commitments in my life — such as this here blog — tend to slide.  So it’ll slide.  I’ll stop feeling guilty about it, which is a benefit for you because you won’t be confronted with those insufferable “I’m soooooo sorry I haven’t posted” posts.  I shall post when I have leisure, or when someone lights my fire; otherwise, I shall not.

Nathan

For this latest roundtable of the B-Masters Cabal, covering silent movies, I initially planned to take the easy way out and review one or more of the silent Oz series films (directed mostly by Baum himself) that I’ve picked up for a buck at the dollar store. But then I thought, “What silent movie could I, alone among the B-Masters, do justice to in a review?” And with that, my duty became obvious: Trapped by the Mormons (1922), one of a spate of anti-Mormon melodramas made post-WWI in Britain. I guess the English were so worried about us Mormons stealing their daughter and war widows that they threw caution, good taste, and filmmaking skill to the wind in an effort to warn the people!

In an unrelated update, Arkham Tales has already received almost thirty story submissions (I expect it to cross that goalpost sometime overnight). Not all are being accepted, but a good many are, and it’s very heartening to see that kind of response from the few venues in which I’ve announced the magazine. I guess this is the kind of outlet that writers were seeking and not finding.

(Whether advertisers are similarly grateful for the publication remains to be seen…)

Nathan

Since the launch earlier this week, Arkham Tales has gotten six submissions; two are being rejected outright, two were sent back with suggestions for revision, one was accepted, and one I’m still mulling. Not bad for the first week, although I would expect that if I don’t keep finding new forums on which to promote it, submissions will taper off. (Have YOU told YOUR friends about Arkham Tales?)

Nathan

There’s a new book review up at Disposable Lit Reviews for The Many-Colored Land by Julian May. No Saturday Action Matinee update, despite my best intentions, because it’s the middle of the Olympics and I couldn’t get my kids to shut off the world-wide celebration of jock culture to watch a chapter with me for twenty minutes.

Nathan

And how does it happen that I’m reviewing a zombie movie outside of my habitually-prescribed month-long window in October? Pretty easily, really; I told Rick Popko, co-producer/co-writer-/co-director/co-star of Retardead (2008), that I’d get to his screener as soon as it came in. I could do no less for the filmmaking team that brought us Monsturd (2002).

Nathan

This will be surprising for no one, and even less surprising for some:

107 As a 1930s husband, I am Very Superior Take the test!

On the other hand, I wonder what my score would be if my wife used the test to assess me…

(via)

Nathan

Here’s the new project I was going to announce last week until the hosting kerfuffle delayed me: Arkham Tales, a free PDF magazine of weird fiction.

I’m putting the call out for writers and artists to contribute (this is a paying market), as well as advertisers. I plan to put notices in relevant messageboards over the next week or two, but if you frequent a forum where such an announcement would be welcome, feel free to pass the word along.

Nathan

Technical difficulties have made me uneasy about trying to post. Let me tell you them!

Sometime last week, my webhost contacted me with the urgent news that my account was taking up between 97% and 100% of the load on the shared server. This is a great little hosting account here: 500 GB of storage, 5000 GB of bandwidth, 20 domains, unlimited subdomains… but somehow my web empire was monopolizing the server. Their detailed explanation wasn’t much help: “It’s your PHP.”

That really doesn’t narrow it down. WordPress, of which I’ve got over half a dozen installations, runs on PHP. So does my Simple Machines Forum software. Something, somewhere, was monopolizing server load. (It wasn’t an outgrowth of simple traffic; neither my bandwidth nor my hit counts showed more than the piddling little levels of traffic that I have habitually generated.) With the threat of an impending shutdown looming over my head, I’ve been trying to implement the frustratingly vague tips that tech support fed me. Enable the caching plugin on every WordPress installation! Update all your plugins! Shut down plugins! Optimize your database tables! Rub yourself with butter and dance naked in the streets! With every piece of advice, I’d have to implement it (worst part was choosing which plugins to shut down without crippling my sites), then wait four hours or so, then ask tech support to check the server load for me (there was no means for me to check that directly from my shared hosting account).

After the full week, I finally broke down and followed their directive: I upgraded to a Virtual Private Server (VPS), which gives me both higher specified server load and a means to monitor it. It’s also about eight times as expensive. (Actually, the sales rep over the upgrade said that my server load was so high that I really ought to move to a dedicated server for $224 a month. That’s when I lost it with the sales rep, and used some ALL CAPS in my reply: I’m not generating that kind of traffic! I’m using barely any bandwidth despite the server load, which means that it’s an errant program that tech support hasn’t been able to figure out!) On a VPS, I can create wholly separate accounts for each domain (currently they’re all domain names added on to subdomains to coldfusionvideo.com), which will allow me to narrow down the server sucker at least to the individual domain generating the load.

I finally put in the request for the upgrade Friday morning; they got back to me about my new VPS account Friday night after I had left town (more on that below); Saturday afternoon I started redirecting all of my domain names to the new DNS settings, and that looked like it was all successful this morning.

And as far as I can see, the server load is negligible. Something in moving the account corrected the phantom error.

(Sigh.)

Whatever I do from here, I’m not staying on this VPS plan; either I’ll request to go back to a shared hosting plan (and hope that the phantom error doesn’t reassert itself, laughing and twirling its ghostly moustache), or switch to a VPS account from another host, as there are plenty comparable services that are cheaper.

So. While that’s been occupying the technical side of my attention, several other events have occurred in the meatspace realm:

Our fridge broke! Michele noticed a distinct lack of frigidity in the main refrigerator box on Friday. The freezer was fine, though. I spent as much time as I could tinkering with it on Saturday, which mostly meant bringing the laptop into the kitchen and googling various refrigerator repair sites as I puttered. It would help if the parts of our fridge bore even a passing resemblance to those used as examples on the internet. Eventually, on Tuesday morning, we had a repairman in who quickly found the simple problem (but one which I would never have found), and charged us a slim and reasonable fee. The only real casualties were some leftover and a couple of gallons on milk.

We sold the Ford Contour! I’ve been trying for weeks to unload it, but most nibbles had been turned off by the long list of mechanical problems. (I had been trying to bill it as “a great project car!”) Monday night we got a call from someone who had spoken to Michele that morning; his brother-in-law is a mechanic who can fix all the problems, he had six hundred dollars in cash, and he wanted the car. Well, shucks! We drove to his place that night, signed the title, and walked away from the workhorse in which I had spent far too many commuter hours. (The buyer was, shall we say, an interesting chap. Also lonely, I’m guessing, despite his two teenaged sons. We learned all about his history in martial arts, the longevity of his mother’s siblings, his disdain for Certified Careers Institute, and various other eagerly-proffered opinions. I’m glad he stopped before regaling us with the consistency of his bowel movements.)

We went camping! Friday night was the annual excursion to Antelope Island State Park, out in the middle of the Great Salt Lake. The water level’s even lower than it was last year, which means that the salinity level is high enough for some enterprising individual to open a brine mummification enterprise. The only things alive in the water are great black algae colonies which look like something left behind by the Precambrian Explosions, brine fly larvae, and the ubiquitous brine shrimp, known to you better as “sea monkeys.” Jason brought along a couple of baby food jars and collected some water, some algae, and a dozen sea monkeys, which are currently doing loop-de-loops in their jar. Enchanting little creatures, and easy to care for, too. (No need to change the water! Just top it off with filtered or distilled water when it starts to evaporate!)  Floating in the Great Salt Lake is like being a sensory deprivation chamber, unless you somehow get some water up your nose, in which case IT BURNS IT BURNS OH JEEZ OH MAN IT BURNS RIGHT UP INTO THE FOREHEAD SINUSES AND OH MY SOFT PALATE IT BURNS TOO AND I’M TRYING TO BLOW IT OUT BUT BLOWING DOESN’T HELP AND OH IT BURRRRRRNNNNS

We got bit! This is actually a subset of “We went camping,” but merits its own paragraph because of the insidious character of the mosquito subspecies that has arisen on Antelope Island. You can’t feel them bite. They can fill up with a full sanguine payload without arousing the victim’s suspicion. The temperate temperatures on the Island at almost lake level meant that we slept on top of our sleeping bags in minimal sleepwear; when Michele and I got up in the morning, we discovered a dozen mosquitos in our tent so bloated with our hard-earned blood that they couldn’t find or exit by the tiny rips through which they had entered. They also don’t start itching for another twelve hours, which meant that we were home Saturday evening before we started to discover the locations through which the little bleeders had filled up.

A week in the life, then. Barring further technical problems, you’ll again start to receive bulletins in a more timely manner, which I’m sure you desperately crave.

Nathan

Friday night we had planned to go to our Ward Campout in the mountains. In fact, I had been put in charge of it, as our ward currently has no activities chairperson. Not that it looked like there was going to be a tremendous headcount; fewer than twenty people, including my family, had expressed interest in going. There was just too much going on on that night, including a community barbecue put on by the city, and a wedding reception for the daughter of a member of our bishopric. We were going to be so paltry in numbers that I made arrangements with another larger ward that was going to be using the camp at the same time that we could piggyback on their meal arrangements and reimburse them afterward.

As I said, we at least planned to go. But in the great tradition of Gang Aft Agleying, our car decided to start acting up, and it spent all day Friday in the shop, finally getting done too late for us to pile in our stuff and make it into the mountains before sundown. (This car, you’ll recall, is the one we bought because we didn’t want to put $2000 in repairs into the other one. On Friday, we put $1600 into it.)

As it turns out, nobody from the list of interested parties made it to the campout. We got a report that two younger women from our ward showed up, but nobody up there got our names, so I still haven’t figured out who they were. This qualifies as the worst-attended campout in the ten years I’ve lived here — even worse than the time when mine was one of two families that showed up.

Progress report! Saturday morning, with the help of Robin Buchanan, we got most of our window trim on.

We ran out of the pre-painted one-by-fours owing largely to Michele changing her mind (as is he prerogative) on what she wanted to do. In fact, we ran out of the one-by-fours altogether, painted or not. Robin said he’ll be back some evening this week to work on it some more, and in the meantime we’ll get to painting and caulking on our own. (That’s the same thing we said we’d get to last weekend, but this time I’m not also looking to recuperate from three days of manual labor that my poor desk-bound body isn’t used to.)

Then on Saturday afternoon, I put in four volunteer hours with three other members of the ward at Deseret Industries. Background for you non-Mormons: Deseret Industries (or “the D.I.”) is the Church-run chain of second-hand thrift stores through the Intermountain West, analogous to the Salvation Army stores except that D.I. rocks so much harder. The facility is huge; the store is as large as a department store, and the prep area in back is probably twice as big. I spent two and a half hours sorting donations for the pricer (an employee) who then sorted them by the price they’d end up with on the shelves. Then I spent the next hour and a half receiving and unloading donations at the drive-thru dock. It was good solid work, and with the kindnesses that have been shown me recently by others, I was happy to pay it forward.

I also learned a lot that I’m going to use the next time I’m donating stuff. For instance, I knew that they no longer take anything that needs to be repaired; this time I found out that they won’t use anything that needs to be washed. Canning jars that had sat on a shed shelf for thirty years and gathered a uniform coating of grimy dust? Straight into the dumpsters. A boxful of bed linens that got in the way of a flood and was discolored all along the lower half? Straight into the dumpsters. I had heard before that thrift stores all over the country were seeing their paltry profits swallowed up in costs associated with garbage disposal of inappropriate and unusable donations, but it makes a much bigger impression when you’re filling up your huge garbage container as fast as you can and wheeling it over and over to the compactor. At least they have a deal with a recycler so that any unusable metal objects can be redeemed.

Nathan

And back into the tube I went today, as it was time for my follow-up MRI in anticipation of my six-month checkup with my neurologist in a couple of weeks.  I’m sure glad I’m not claustrophobic, because I can see how spending half an hour in a buzzing plastic tube with Doctor Doom’s headpiece holding you immobile could really get to me if I was.  But I’m not, so I mostly dozed; yeah, it’s noisy, but it’s a rhythmic set of sounds, they give you earplugs, and as I remarked both this time and last time (I’m never above recycling gags), “It’s still easier than trying to nap at home.”

(The picture isn’t from today’s tests; I’m not above recycling graphics, either.  But it’s still a picture of my very own brain.)

Nathan

A Motley Vision » Blog Archive » Mormon Art in Belbury

The enemy of what we know to be right and true is sometimes that which is evil and menacing and immediate, but all too often it is merely the negative space - the absence of anything good and worthwhile that is most damaging. It’s not the occasional reactionary person who yells at you and tells you not to push your religion on him - it’s the huge mass of smiling, happy people who simply wave you away in apathy because they don’t care. That’s what really makes your soul weep.

Nathan

Newsarama.com : SDCC 08 - THE DARK HORSE HORROR PANEL

Amid discussions of new horror comics coming out from Dark Horse:

Next up was Dead Vengeance written and drawn by Bill Morrison, best known for his work at Bongo Comics. The story follows a Private Investigator who wakes up dead, and has to solve his own murder. As Morrison is best known for his cartoony stle, Allie said that the creator won’t be changing his look too much for the tale, but it will be much more somber and darker than his other work.

Hm. Well, I guess I can scratch “finish script for Dead Eye graphic novel” off my to-do list, since it’s that same concept…

Nathan

Well, I’m official.

DBA, check. Next: get the municipal business license that the city says I probably should have had all along. And maybe sometime in the future, make some money at this.

(This is a precursor to a project that I mentioned nebulously a few weeks ago. Public announcement to come next week.)

Nathan

It’s been three days of manual labor for this desk jockey, so I hope you’ve forgive the absence.

When we first bought our house almost ten years ago, it could have used a paint job. Like the other houses in the development that still have their original siding, it had been finished in a kind of corrugated wood-based shingle that just doesn’t exist anymore. We finally steeled ourselves for some renovations this summer, made worse by the fact that the shingles had deteriorated on the western (front) side of the house badly enough that simple painting wasn’t an option; it was time to tear out and replace.

I spent Thursday tearing off the old shingles and the beading board that occupied the spaces around the windows, exposing fifty-year-old punk board. You could see every seam which had let in any water over the years; it reminded me of the overlapping stains on the bottom of the worn carpet that had been in the house when we bought it (the previous owner had had multiple dogs who weren’t entirely housebroken). Thanks to help from Michele and Alex switching off, we got everything off the walls before the sun came over the roof and started pumping its 98-degree heat on the west side.

Friday was almost a write-off. We bought our paint and rented a heavy-duty sprayer, intending to get the primer and base coat on the three other sides by day’s end. It would have been possible, too, if the sprayer we picked up had been maintained and cleaned after its last use. I took it back; the guy behind the counter couldn’t find anything wrong with it, and showed me how well it sprayed some flush water. I took it home. With the help of a neighbor, I finally figured out that just because a pump can handle tap water well doesn’t mean it can handle exterior acrylic. The thing just wouldn’t build up pressure; it was like trying to paint a house with little mouthfuls of paint sucked and sprayed through a drinking straw. And the main filter, we found, was about 90% clogged with someone else’s dry paint. So I rented a unit at a different (and closer) equipment rental place, took the sorry-ass unit back to the first store, showed them the filter and the lack of daylight one could see through it, and got my rental money back. Alas, they couldn’t reimburse me for the four hours I had wasted trying to get their machine to function as promised. Money, you can earn back; time is non-renewable.

Also on Friday, I picked up the new siding: OSB, which is a waterproofed and pre-primed pressboard with wood texture on one side. This was the recommendation of a contractor family we know, a father and two sons who do this for a living. The only reason I felt I could handle the project is that, when we had asked these fine gentlemen for their professional opinion on our house, they had offered their services for free. All hail Clell, Sean, and Robin!

And hail Bryant, too! He was the neighbor who had originally recommended the paintstore-which-shall-remain-nameless (hey, they didn’t run such a slipshod operation when he worked there). He also loaned us his trailer to carry away our ancient ripped-off shingles and siding, and he showed up Saturday morning with the contractor family to help. That made four people who knew what they were doing, plus me. Eventually I stopped “trying to help” (i.e., getting in the way) and instead caught up on the painting while they applied the panels.

Current status: the paneling is all up, all four sides of the house have been painted with the base color, and the gloriously functional paint sprayer has been returned with much gratitude. We still have to put on the trim bands, redo the window treatments on the front, and paint the rest of the trim. I’ve tried — nay, demanded — that the contractor family allow me to pay them for their efforts from here on our, but they just blow me off. It’s good to know good people. (Although no matter what they do, they’re still in for a lifetime of home preserves and fresh-baked brownies.)

I’d also like to give a shout-out to Caffeine Free Mountain Dew, my new best friend.  It finally became available in our market, and I picked up a twelve-pack before work began.  I think I slammed six or eight of them on Friday.  I had no trouble giving up colas (especially diet colas) when I dropped the caffeine, but Mountain Dew just tastes sooooo gooooooooood.  And even without the caffeine, I still had the goodness of high frustose corn syrup and bromided vegetable oil.  Yummy!  (Note:  That kind of consumption is not recommended on days you’re not planning on exerting great quantities of sweaty energy.)

Nathan

Richard Cohen - Ink-Stained Wretchedness - washingtonpost.com

About 40 percent of younger Americans (26 to 40) have tattoos. About 100 percent of these have clothes they once loved but now hate. How can anyone who knows how fickle fashion is, how times change, how their own tastes have “improved,” decorate their body in a way that’s nearly permanent? I don’t get it.

Nathan