Net Paranoia

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There’s something called the Names Database at namesdatabase.com. According to my paranoid mind it’s some sort of name and email harvesting engine. I ran across it in my semiregular googling for old friends. Lo and behold, a friend’s name showed up in their little google snippet. That was unusual right there. Bernice Jinkerson doesn’t show up anywhere.

Thing is, in order to long on to the Names Database you have to give it the names of five people. But if you give it a name it’s already got, it asks you for another name. And another. I never got to the Important Page that I was looking for because, after feeding it a dozen email addresses I gave up. No worries anyone, I didn’t give it your address. I made up addresses. A random name generator could do that.

The weirdest part is that there’s no other listing in google regarding “namesdatabase.com”. Even more suspicious.

Moving Mom

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Aged Mother will be moving in soon, probably the first week of November. We could take her this weekend if she didn’t mind sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Nizzibet spent much time yesterday moving books and furniture out of her office and then rearranging things downstairs to fit the new arrivals. Jaydogg pitched in on moving the bigger pieces of furniture. I spent some hours last night moving books and more furniture. More work will be done tonight.

This weekend we’ll work on getting bedroom type furniture – a box spring and bedframe, a lamp or two, a little heater maybe. We might get around to cleaning out the garage. That job is unrelated to Aged Mother’s arrival. It’s just that once you start moving furniture you might as well keep going until everything has a home again. There is much in the garage that needs to find a home somewhere other than the garage. Preferably on someone else’s property.

Ahead

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Project Updates

I’ve updated the front page at Sentient 39. Finally some original art – giving a hint to what the series will be about.

No 2004 calendar. I needed to have managed my time better this year. Ah well, I’ve got a head start on 2005.

The Black Seal #3 is scheduled to go to press in December. Lots of illustrations to finish for that.

Illustration work for Mandate of Heaven continues, a little bit at a time.

Searching. Finding. Asking.

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Some days I find myself searching the internet, almost randomly, clicking from site to site, following links further out and googling for new info on old subjects. Yesterday was like that. No matter what I found, that wasn’t what I was looking for. I know on those days that I’m searching for an epiphany – an answer to a mystery that I can’t define. A piece is missing. I don’t know what it looks like or what will happen if I find it but I feel compelled to look. It’s pretty much guaranteed that I won’t find it. Once I recognize that that’s what I’m doing I’m usually willing to do something else.

On the way home I stopped in at one of the local used book shops. I wanted to pick up a copy of Mallory’s Oracle for BigSister. Since she likes Andrew Vachss’s work I figure she’d like Carol O’Connell. No luck with Mallory. But sitting on the shelf were Night of Morningstar and Dragon’s Claw, two Modesty Blaise novels. Hello! Good condition paperbacks at a low price. Best part is, it was a complete surprise. I’ve so rarely seen Modesty Blaise books in stores that I’d forgotten to look for them.

To top the day off I called the Mother and invited her to come live with us. She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no. She was happy I asked. If she does say yes there will be a lot of things to arrange to make this work. But one thing at a time.

Clarke’s Law in Action

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I love HTML. I don’t know why it works but so long as I follow its ruthless set of standards then it allows me to do magical things. A couple of the links at Sentient 39 were just refusing to work. I’d look at the code, see nothing wrong and then reload the page while figuring that some glitch at Keenspace was causing the problem.

Nope. I’m the glitch. This morning I finally saw the missing colon and the extra letter in the addresses. Add colon. Remove letter. Now the link to the GLYPH essay works from the Essays page and the link to the It! illustration works from the B-Movie Monsters page. Magic!

Or a technology sufficiently advanced to appear so. Heh.

Building a Web Presence

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If the last bit of fiddling that I did to Sentient 39 works out then I just might be able to leave well enough alone. For a while. I’ve added images to the Life in Comics and the GLYPH essays.

If there’s anyone out there with copies of Cheap Thrills, The Highly Unlikely Adventures of Moe and Detritus and The Davey Thunder / Jack Lightning Show who would be willing to scan the covers and send me some jpegs, please let me know. Otherwise I’ll add those images sometime, maybe in 2005. It’ll take that long for me to figure out which box they’re stored in.

Mad Skills

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Spent a bunch of time today mucking about with Sentient 39. I rescued the GLYPH essay from my archives here, chopped it into a couple of pieces that hopefully make sense and linked them to the essays page. I’ve also hunted down my entries so far on the B-Movie Monsters Re-Imagination Project, plopped them all on a page and fixed the links with the appropriate illustrations at Epilogue.net. No new artwork sadly but my HTML skills are ever so slightly improved.

Testing. Testing.

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Just testing some HTML here. Keenspace doesn’t provide me with the instant response I need to see if I’ve coded correctly.

As demonstrated, I got it wrong five out of six times. I actually got it wrong more times than that but I’m not going to fill up too much space by leaving all my mistakes lying around.

 

Primal Complaint

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Ever have one of those mornings when you just want to bitch and moan about everything? You don’t want to do this because you actually have any valid complaints; you just feel like complaining? And whining? And carrying on as if your petty little problems are the most important god damn things in the world?

Now try following through on that when the only other conscious beings around you at 5:45 a.m. are a cat and a sasquatch. The cat couldn’t care less what you have to say. She just wants to come in, get fed and head out again into the darkness. And the sasquatch has discovered tetris and has been playing it obsessively since you went to bed last night. He’s still at it on Nizzibet’s iMac. We’re probably going to have to get her a new keyboard. Those big sasquatch fingers can’t be gentle on the thing.

Which leaves me to complain to y’all. Consider yourselves complained at.

What? You want details? Silly people.

All the complaints are pre-language growls, howls and snarls. It ain’t the substance that matters – it’s the sound. Text is inadequate.