La Phalene

Recently Apple got every nerd on the planet chirping about the ‘ipad’. their new touch pad product, and about for the past three years, kindles, and the future of ebooks have become a popular source of small talk debates, generally a divide between people who get excited over new tech for the sake of new tech and cranky purists who talk about the joys of a good old paperback. Ebooks are also at the root of a debate between a major publishing house, Macmillan and Amazon, where Amazon yanked all the works of the former from their store in a tiff over price fixing.

Another common problem cited with ebooks is DRM, which is a sort of single person liscencing from a product that is a built in self destruct in computer programs, music and other media which limits their use and makes a property vulnerable to suddenly becoming unavailable to the owner when the DRM owning company folds, allow unexpected liscencing yanking and so forth. Understandably this gets people irked. However without protection, all digital media is basically free to copy and share, making piracy extremely easy. For example gigapedia is an enormous search archive of pdfs of books, most of which are still within their copyrights.

I actually don’t mind pdfs that much. Most of my classes’ journal articles are found online through my University’s library, making paper writing an exercise to be conducted in my pajamas. I think ebooks have an important place and are not inherently bad. For example the attempts by the Gutenberg Project are comendable. Classics and out of print lit that would otherwise vanish off the shelves is preserved for free download.

Instead, what concerns me about switching to a new electronic book format is the trashy books. I really like stupid regency novels and historical romances. These are not good books, except that they make me giggle like a hyena on nitrous oxide for the time it takes to consume them. These books are published by the wagon load, formulaic crap that gets dumped into supermarkets and the back shelves of book stores and then forgotten.

I can’t afford to buy these books new; however I get a lot out of second hand shopping and libraries. Lately, living in a big city, I get a lot out of free book heaps When I buy these books second hand, many are outright unreadable or only useable once, so I cycle them back out, leaving them in cafes and Laundromats and other places. I also recycle any other books I’m bored with, from knitting guides to great lit.

Because of the sheer volume of these books I can easily steal enough to feed my reading habit, often nicely formatted into PDFs, but unless I want to actively participate in something illegal, I’m not in a position to pass books along anymore, or participate in bottom feeding from second hand book sales.

I’m also concerned what this will do to text book sales. Regularly updated, specialty books cost an arm and a leg. I understand some of this is evil on the part of publishers and some of it is the nature of the market. Right now, I can survive by buying second hand text books and professors who are lenient enough to permit using past editions, where it’s a new textbook. I am deeply pessimistic about the possibility that this will appreciably lower the cost of text books, just make it hard to get more uses out of your ‘book’.

I’m having one of those fuzzy evenings when my brain isn’t feeling like it wants to move in step with my body. I’m not sure why- I think I might not be sleeping enough because I’m having these very vivid dreams. They’re all very lurid and odd, one part from things I’ve seen during the day and one part something absaloutely absurd. I’ve had two dreams involving white supremacists (I mean skin heads). Maybe American History X made a big impression on me I didn’t know about?

Today, instead of class the professor showwed a video on Jung, who was deeply interested in the archeytypes that show up in dreams and fantasies. The video was terrible, taking a psuedo mystical direction with bad kabalah paintings and crappy synth clips, along with random 60’s stock footage and grainy sound. I wonder what he’d make of my often violent, gender swapping, disjointed narratives? My sense of ‘me’ is always very fluid, so at any moment I can snap to a portly middle aged politician trying to escape out a broken window, a man trying to survive in prison, me as I am, a princess… My dreams are the landscapes I spend the most time in or fantastic recombinations of things I’ve seen during the day. Last night I dreamed we were escaping through a city that looked like a several story shopping mall while a matriarch ruled government was trying to catch me and my plucky band of rebels. Reality was proving fairly coherent despite several casual gender swaps, and the male in the group (who I’d been, only moment ago) was trying to shoot an inflatable survey drone with a machine gun, when suddenly we introduced an inflatable helicopter. Like, with seams, life sized but made of vynil.

I get the sense that my brain is making up an explaination for a series of random images which are being generated by free association- there’s no story, just creation that explains my motive for them moment.

According to research into dream imagery, once black and white television stopped being the norm, people’s common black and white dreams stopped happening. My mother, the writer, used to dream in story voice over narrative and my brother dreams in video games. My dreams wander all over the place, but I think I’m going to be in the camp that believes that Jung is full of it, and doo-dads in my dream are personal brain randomness.

I have another cold, which means I spent the day mostly in bed watching my gentleman go completely to pieces over a thesis problem and making whiny noises. I did get up the energy to make banana bread, but not to do laundry.

Right now I’m feeling much better and listening to “Romantic Death” on repeat, probably until my gentleman starts flinging potted plants and other kitchen table detrius at the back of my head.

Also I’ve set up a small camp in H&H just for the heck of it- eventually my goal is to tame some animals and have a nice little farm. Sadly I’m lacking in metals, though, so important homestead essentials like sausage grinders are well beyond my means unless I mysteriously find a mine or someone lets me freeload.

Yesterday I finally got around to watching Avatar in theater, and since it was Imax, my hearing is still really painful. It was as advertised, basically a kid’s movie with profanity, computer game style combat and pretty visuals. It was fun to watch, and while every step of the plot was predictable and the science wasn’t anything to write home about, the writing was tight. It basically tapped into what a big screen with good colours can do, by giving you silly escapism.

My gentleman also managed to have a huge fight about the mess in our apartment, and I dealt with my damaged boots, exchanging black boots with a busted zipper to deep brown boots. I’d rather have more black boots, but they didn’t have any and brown boots are pretty too.

Since I’ve stopped writing about my sex life I think that my readership has proably returned to the trickle of family members it was before I made kink the focus of my writing.

I’m going to Florida at the end of February, lucky me, where I will stay with my grandparents for a week. They usually take me to see various sights, and buy me an enormous amount of clothing, most of which is too big, too old or both. It’s one of those awkward situations where I’m getting a gift, whether I like it or not.

As usual, the amount of spam in my comment filter has gotten bigger than I am, and I’ve pretty much lost hope of deleting it all. Some day I really should figure out how to install the new Wordpress framework into my ultra cheap, but very quiet hosting service.

What have I been up to, good and bad?

Well, I wrote a friend a long and rambly letter, and I got lots of organizing supplies from Ikea, free from my gentleman’s father. The place looks much better, though we still need a plastic bin for his socks and for little kitchen incidentals, and I have to decide where to put my calender.

School has been mostly going well, as I’m attending my classes and taking good notes. I have two things to work on, first of all I’m still not doing my readings (ARRRGH!) and second of all, I really, really need to work on feeling nervous about socializing. I keep meaning to talk to women in my classes, but I feel like I’d be butting in and intruding. Feh. I’m almost to the point of wearing a “Hi, I’m nice!” t-shirt.

I’m also a bit annoyed with being groggy. I’m hoping the new curtains, once we put them up, will remedy this, but in the mean time I feel like I need more sleep even if I take a midafternoon nap.

This dinner involved duck legs, kitchen timing screw ups and an impromptu soup course to satisfy a hungry gentlemen.

I started by preparing the two duck legs by placing them on a bed of quarted potatoes so the fat would drip onto them, and then peppered the duck and covered it with a layer of sliced mushrooms and liberal amounts of my favourite spice, savoury. This was popped into an oven at 325 F, which my online duck cooking guide assured me would take nothing more than an hour and a quarter.

At the 1:15 mark, I washed and sliced up carrots (one large carrot per person) and put them in a pot with a big handful of fresh rosemary from my herb pots. This goes really well with tarragon too, so don’t feel locked in. Then I covered them with just enough water only one or two edges were just peeping out, and put them on the back of the stove at medium high.

I checked on the duck, which seemed to be a little pink skinned still. Phooey.

About when the carrots were reaching the perfect, crunchy but now cooked stage I took them off the heat and checked the duck again, which was looking, much to my chagrin, dry and undercooked. Announcing the late leaning nature of dinner created plaintive howls from the other party and one portion of perfect cooked carrots was snaffled and drenched in butter, while I made an impromptu baste for the duck using a few tbsp of chicken broth, the lightest of dots of chipotle hot sauce and and a squirt of olive oil.

With carrots only wetting the appitite, I threw together Dr. Miso soup, which is a doctored miso soup, the standard mix (even home made miso soup is practicaly instant) checked with more chicken broth to take away some of the overly bracing miso taste.

Only after another hour past the provided cooking time was the succulant, fatty duck ready to be served up and eaten. I shall have to adjust my cooking accordingly next time.