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pardon the (impending) dust

The process of website improvement has started. So far, the only change is that I’ve moved the entire site down a level: everything that was swantower.com/marie/* can now be reached at swantower.com/*. Soon — possibly later today — kniedzw will be helping me set up a redirect so that anybody who’s bookmarked a specific page will get bumped along to the new location. After that, the actual revamping will begin.

If you notice anything broken on the site, drop me a line at marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com, and I’ll fix it as soon as I can.

How much of a geek am I?

I suspect the answer lies in the way I’m grinning over my latest acquisition, a book called Cockney Past and Present, which was written in 1938 and apparently remains one of the best histories of cockney speech.

Sheer. Brilliance.

From mrissa and janni: Tattúínárdœla saga

In English, The Saga of the People of the Tatooine River Valley. An analysis of how George Lucas’ science-fictional adaptation of a Middle High German epic (the Himelgengærelied or Song of the Skywalkers) differs from the earlier and less corrupted Icelandic saga text.

I do wish Lucas had chosen the Icelandic text for the exchange between Veiðari and Lúkr — much less whiny, much more badass and amusing at the same time. (You’d be hard-pressed to beat the Norse for deadpan reactions to doom.)

more pictures

Okay, I finally got off my butt and finished sorting through my hundred and hundreds of pictures from India to cull them down to the 100MB I could upload in a month — only to discover that I’d hit the limit for publicly-available pictures (200), and if I wanted the oldest ones (the Midnight Never Come research set) to be visible, I’d have to either delete some of what I just posted, or upgrade my account. So I upgraded, and now I don’t have to worry about that 100MB limit.

Oh well. It’s probably better for your sanity and mine that I restricted my choices that sharply; otherwise this could be the Photoset That Never Ends. Instead it’s a selection of the better results. I hope you enjoy.

Since setting up a photo gallery on my own site is one of the things I intend to do with the redesign, please take a moment if you haven’t already and give me your thoughts on what the new look should be.

Impending website redesign

Poll time; please take a moment to answer this, as the more responses I get, the better.

I’m preparing to do a fairly substantial redesign on my website, including (among other things) a visual facelift. I always meant to make it more colorful, but never did decide where I was going graphically — which, as it turns out, is the subject of this poll. I know I want to change the color scheme and provide some kind of image at the top and/or side(s), but I frankly have no idea what that should be. So I’ve put together this handy poll, to see what ideas you all have, and whether those nudge me out of my current waffling and into a useful direction. Check as many boxes as you like; if you like several but prioritize one choice over the others, say so in comments.

Feel free to get as detailed as you like in the comments. (And if you’re coming here from outside LJ, you don’t need an account to comment, though it will help if you sign some kind of name.) This is a mass brainstorming session, basically, so let’s bounce ideas around until something comes out.

someone who understands me!

From ellen_kushner, a fabulous website on the topic of long hair. And by “long,” I mean that my own hair (down to about my hips) is maybe on the short side for what she’s talking about. It’s a great site overall, with very common-sense advice for many types of hair (not just long straight Caucasian hair like mine), but what I love it for is this page, with various possibilities only marginally more complicated than my usual braid, and more interesting to boot.

Much of the long-hair advice is stuff I’ve been doing anyway — I don’t wash my hair every day (I don’t need to), I wear it in a braid (though not up) almost all the time, I don’t use a blow-dryer or curling iron or coloring products or anything else of the sort. I’ll probably try some of the other tips, though, especially since they’re generally in the vein of less maintenance rather than more. My hair is long enough already for my taste, but I wouldn’t mind making it even healthier for its length.

Icon needed.

My eternal gratitude to whoever can make me an LJ icon showing Inigo Montoya with the text “I hate waiting.” (Preferably him on the cliff, around about the point where he says that.)

Edit: And we have a winner! Thanks to greek_amazon.

more photos

I still haven’t sorted through my India pictures enough to post them (Bad Swan! No biscuit! Or whatever one feeds swans as treats), but it occurred to me I did have scanned-in copies of a few shots from the last photoset I took on film, during my 2002 trip to Japan. The scanning means their size and quality is not the best, but I put them up anyway for you to enjoy.

technical question re: websites

Is there any convenient way to do a mass-redirect on various URLs? Basically, I want to simplify the directory structure of my site, such that everything which used to be swantower.com/marie/X becomes swantower.com/X. But people may have bookmarked particular links, and I’d like them to be automatically redirected when they try the old URL. What I don’t know is whether there’s any simple method for achieving this. Help?

link roundup

Little-known fact: March 8th is celebrated in some countries (like the country of my office) as The Feast of Cleaning Up Your Browser Bar.

Con or Bust auction — this closes on the 13th. Bidding for a signed set of Onyx Court books is up to $25 $30, and the money goes toward helping fans of color get to cons they might not otherwise make.

Sirens conference update — I failed to post this in time for the chat on Saturday, but more info on getting involved in programming. Remember, despite the word “conference,” you don’t have to be an academic to participate.

Reproductive Justice linkspam — I hadn’t heard of this organization before, but basically they’re a group that looks past the abortion debate (which has a tendency to dominate the conversation in the U.S.) to broader issues of pregnancy, sexual violence, disability, transsexualism, immigration, economics, and pretty much anything else that affects the ability of women to decide what to do with themselves and their bodies. There are some really heartbreaking stories in there (like the one about confiscating an immigrant woman’s child on the grounds that her lack of English made her unfit to be a mother in the U.S.), and lots of opportunities to take action.

Ignoring people you don’t trust — an interesting look at how the sources of statistical information and analysis can, or should, affect the way you receive that information. On the one hand, the studies claiming smoking reduces risk of Alzheimer’s were mostly written by people affiliated with the tobacco industry; on the other hand, the earliest work documenting a connection between smoking and lung cancer was published by Nazis. So it isn’t a simple question.

A flowchart of where the Google Books Settlement could go from here — a simplified flowchart. Boggle at its complexity.

Johari Window — more than a meme, less than a psych study; click through to choose how you would describe me.

Alice in Wonderland

Spoilery thoughts will go behind the cut, but the exterior thought is this: that Tim Burton, working from a base of freaking ALICE IN WONDERLAND, has done a better job with the notion of “strong-minded female protagonist does protagonisty things, up to and including saving people and kicking ass” than most directors who set out to tell a story about a Strong Woman Kicking Ass.

The movie has flaws, but this aspect pleased me quite a bit.

Now, on to the spoilers.

I feel like a dork.

See, okay — I’ve known for a while that it would greatly simplify my record-keeping if I had a dedicated credit card for business-related purchases. And what with these research trips to London, a decent number of those purchases are made overseas. And, well, the terms this card offers for such things are actually pretty good.

So I’ve just applied for a <snooty tone> Harvard Alumni credit card. </snooty tone>

I mocked kniedzw for getting one; now I’m eating my words. But I’m still going to feel like a giant dork the first hundred times I whip it out to pay for anything.

Edited for userpic change: Because really, if I’m going to do the snooty tone, I need the image to go with it.

changing modes . . . now.

I wish I had a switch I could flip in my brain, that would let me transition cleanly and quickly from thinking about one story to thinking about another.

Because I was working happily on game prep for tonight when something came along and knocked my brain onto another track entirely, and now I can’t get it back. It’s hard enough, gear-switching from the nineteenth century American West to nineteenth-century London; now I’ve got Option C distracting me, too, and it’s completely unrelated to everything else.

It’s potentially a good distraction, mind you. But still very inconvenient. If only I could turn it on and off at will.

street date!

Yes, it’s odd that I usually get this first from Amazon — but it looks like the publication date for A Star Shall Fall will be August 31st. (The day before my birthday!) For those who have been champing at the bit to get this one, at least now you know when to expect it.

a (stupid) epiphany on start dates

April 1st is my start date for the Victorian book. Only not really, because it’s freaking April 1st, and I’ll just have had ankle surgery, so it might be more like April 2nd or 3rd. But anyway, I’m starting in April, and I’ve had this fixed in my head for a while.

But this is kind of a stressful thing. Will I be ready to start by April? I have a sense of who Eleanor is, but not what her circumstances will be at the beginning of the novel, nor how exactly she got there, nor what happened to the guy whose name may or may not be Jonathan. I don’t know what Dead Rick owes, nor who he owes it to. I kind of know where I’m aiming for with the end of the book, but that’s more than a hundred thousand words away, and what if this turns out like the comet book where I start writing and then figure out some of it’s wrong so I have to backtrack only then I’ve wasted that time and okay the reason I’m starting in April (instead of the usual May) is to give myself time to waste if I have to . . .

Why do I have to wait until April?

Well, because in April it’ll start being a thousand words a day, rain or shine, and if I write the scenes I already have in my head (one definite, one semi-definite, one rather vague), then that’s three scenes not queued up to get me going once I start. Except that I stopped and thought about it, and realized that’s stupid. I figure things out by writing them; I know this.

So today I wrote the prologue. (Actually I wrote the prologue back in 2007, when I thought I’d be doing this book before Ashes, but having written two intervening novels since then, I scrapped it and started fresh.) Some time this week I may write Eleanor’s first scene, or Dead Rick’s. And it may be partial and I may come back later to change things; hell, I may decide that Dead Rick is not in fact the right character for this book, which is one of the things I’ve been uncertain about. I may move Eleanor to a different part of London and kill her mother (or unkill her, since that’s another detail currently in limbo) and change my mind six times about what’s up with the daughter of the family Eleanor works for. But whatever I do, I’ll be better off poking at it now, casually, experimentally, without the pressure April will bring, because that vastly ups the odds that between now and then I’ll find the answers to some of the questions that are presently unanswered.

And the point is to get the words on the page. This isn’t NaNoWriMo, where it’s cheating to have some of your wordage done early. As long as I finish the thing by deadline, it doesn’t matter if I do it a thousand words a day or ten thousand words in a two-day binge and then nothing for a week.

So I’ve started writing the Victorian book. It isn’t April yet, but that’s okay. I have 857 words, and it’s a good start.

today’s mental writing exercise

This is totally cat-vacuuming — it’s unproductive speculation on something that probably won’t ever happen, and even if it did, I certainly wouldn’t be involved — but I started it on my walk to and from the post office, to keep myself occupied, and it’s an interesting exercise in thinking about story structure. Spoilers for the video game Dragon Age: Origins follow below the cut.

How would you go about making DA:O into a movie?