Amelia's Blog

Strangely, every day this week, I've went to a local Panera Bread after work for an hour and started writing. Doing it tonight again. It tends to tucker me out a bit, but I think that'll stop after I get used to it.

The strange thing about being a writer, even a wannabe writer, is how... split it can be in your head. By that I mean how you can absolutely love to write, derive such satisfaction from doing it, and yet be absolutely terrified of actually doing it. I've wanted to write something seriously since I was in high school. I've made a few attempts, like the blog for example, to actually do it. And, well... if you're reading this, then you know how well that usually goes. I'm really trying to focus myself on the idea, at least, of writing. I've got about three and a half scenes written of some hero fiction that's got me jazzed, and the characters are nice and snug in my head. Unfortunately, as usually happens, a whole 'nother idea has started in my brain and... now it's hard to think of anything else. This brings me to the conclusion that I really need writing discipline if I ever want to make it work. I'm actually hoping that I can get a few small freelanc...

ROSWELL!! ROSWELL!! So, I got to thinking about that "legendary" event in hour history. For that one guy (you know who you are) who doesn't know what The Roswell Incident was, on July 7, 1947, in Roswell, New Mexico, a very startling report came through that the Air Force had recovered a crashed UFO. Later of course, the story was retracted and they said it was a weather balloon... which was then later retracted when they said it was an experimental project called Mogul. This interesting thing to me isn't the UFO... but the USAF's changing story. Considering the rampant distrust the American people seem to have for their government, is it really all that surprising that no one believes the stories of a balloon or a project involving crash test dummies? Which by the way wasn't even a project until 1953. Yeah, Mogul holds less water than the original weather balloon story. Now, I don't know what happened on that day in a previously unremarkable town, but so...

Hello again, everyone. Been a few days, but a bit has been going on. Second, I drank the Kool-Aid and bought a Macbook. Yep, I'm now a Mac person. Mostly. I've still got my Dell machine for City of Heroes and another game or two, and I'm getting those installed on Linux so I can boot into Windows as little as possible :) My first impressions of the Mac are positive. Since I've only had it a few days, I'm not completely used to the interface, and to be honest the lack of a normal right-click annoys me some. In fairness, it's not hard to reach up with a finger and it control or command to get a context menu, but we're talking twenty plus years of training here! But that aside, it's pretty positive. I was impressed by the amount of stuff pre-installed. Garageband, iMovie, iPhoto, and the like. I can see why poetasters and other "new media" types love Macs. For my part, it's been something I've wanted to do for a while now, and since Uncle ...

Miscellania R.I.P. Fletcher Hanks Jr. via Newsarama. Guy was the son of a Golden Age artists. He was 90. And died from the complications of a car crash. Read on, peeps. This guy was awesome. Rest in peace, indeed. Man declared dead, says he feels 'pretty good' via CNN Goes to show what science and medicine doesn't know. How Hitler Would Have Rebuilt Berlin via Time Yeah, yeah. I waive Godwin's Law on this one. All kidding aside, the evil that was Adolf Hitler holds a decidedly morbid fascination for me. That someone that blatently evil can hold sway over so many people says so much for the psychology of the human race. Plus all the nifty conspiracy theories surrounding him! And finally... DC's Pulp Heroes Annual series covers again, via Newsarama. Those of you who are avid comic fans remember these wonderful covers for 1997's annual line. They were painted by various artists and were all based off of '30's pulp novel covers. Some were even direct ho...

Happy Belated Zombie Jesus Day! There's a lot out there I just don't get. From Cracked.com I found the "10 Lamest Dinosaur Names". Which in and of itself, wouldn't be bad. I mean, there's odd names. But nothing, to me, beats Erectopus . Yep. Erectopus. I wish I was making that up. There's just... something wrong with that? How wrong you ask? Well... do an image search. Aside from Chuck Norris (Which... kind of bothers me in an obscure way...), there some... interesting imagery from Japan. Which is less surprising and more disturbing. I'm a big admirer of Japanese culture, but some aspects of it are a bit odd. Thankfully, Safesearch does block said image, but Cracked had it posted. And I cannot unsee it. Brain Bleach didn't work. Oh why didn't it work...

Musings How often do you sit in front of your computer not really knowing what the heck to do? The worst part is when this happens at work. So, I'm deciding whether or not to make the jump to a Mac. I've got a nice refund from Uncle Sam coming, so I know I'm picking up an iPod Touch, but I was looking at the prices of a low-end MacBook, and was surprised. Now you might be asking why a low-end? Well, this is more like a transition machine rather than a main machine. Kind of a way to test the waters for me. The only thing that *really* keeps me on Windows is City of Heroes and iTunes. iTunes of course runs on a Mac, so that's no big, but CoH is a stumbling block. However, I know CoH is more than playable in Wine on Ubuntu. Mac is a flavor of Unix (FreeBSD to be exact), so I don't see why I couldn't get Wine to run on OSX. Though, I will look for more native solutions, I don't foresee too many issues with this. Otherwise, I'll just keep my duel-boot Ubuntu/...