[18 Dec 2009|02:45am] desertbreeze it's 2am and it's gonna be a long day ahead. there is no christmas spirit here yet, at least not until 5pm this afternoon or until i recuperate from this ordeal. shelf exam is traumatizing. i am so reluctant to go take it but what can i do. i have to take 3 exams in the next 12 hours. the first one starts in about 5 hours. i'm too tired/numb to freak out, though i know i am nervous because my stomach has been acting up since last night. oh well. life goes on. at least i get to sleep in until whenever i want tomorrow morning. that is something to look forward to. post comment

Martin Espada -- When the Leather is a Whip [17 Dec 2009|02:06pm] polymexina "When the Leather is a Whip" At night with my wife sitting on the bed I turned from her to unbuckle my belt so she won't see her father unbuckling his belt. 3 comments|post comment

ellipses [15 Dec 2009|09:36pm] polymexina You want to talk about fairies/winged humans having sex? THIS is how you do it. "You've known her?" "More than once," he said, smiling sadly. "At the moment of ecstasy her wings thrash like leaves in a storm." -- Robert Silverberg, *Nightwings* So, so much better than anything in the MG series. 4 comments|post comment

recaptcha: crowdsourcing in action [14 Dec 2009|02:38pm] hobgadling You know those little CAPTCHA images you get on forms - it's usually a word or a string of letters that are all "crumpled" looking. It's supposed to be easy for humans to see but difficult (or impossible) for computers to understand, to keep those nasty spambots out. Recaptcha is one of the services that offers it - for free. They have plugins for lots of platforms to make implementation easy. And how do they pay for it all? Not with advertising. A: They sell digitizing services. books/text is messy - can't be read accurately by OCR software thousands of people identifying what a messy word says recaptcha profit!!! It's the perfect combination. I think that if we can build games based on the same principle, we'll increase our collective computational power exponentially. What if all those millions of hours people spent playing WoW were actually spent doing useful work? I think if we were really cool about it, we could train an AI with it. See also : Google Image Labeler post comment

nanowrimo reflections [14 Dec 2009|10:57am] hobgadling As Elbert Hubbard said, "There is no failure except in no longer trying." So I officially failed NaNoWriMo this year. I knew this about halfway through. I got sick on the 3rd or 4th day in and instead of trying to double-duty writing and working with getting well, I just took a break and rested for a few days. That killed my momentum. I also realized about a week in that I should have done much more planning. The idea that my muse would just turn on and the characters would "write themselves" was, in retrospect, idealistic. I started with a bunch of ideas. Situations and elements that I wanted to include in my story. Unfortunately, elements do not have wills of their own - they need characters to animate them. Had I started with fully-formed characters, they may have been more willing to write their own story. I did have a couple of good sketches at the beginning, but it wasn't enough. I did some fantastically productive procrastinating, though: working on dormant projects, trying my hand at the guitar again. Towards the end of the month, I realized that even if I wasn't going to work on a *novel*, I should still try and write *something* every day. At this point, I wished that had been my goal all along. I have plenty of half-formed blog posts and partially-birthed essays lying around on my computer, and if I had made it a goal to publish one of those every day I could have had a very productive month. Unfortunately, I was too stuck on the "No" part of NaNoWriMo when I should have been thinking of it as NaWriMo. Ah well, water under the bridge. I've learned the lessons this year for how to make next year successful. Here's to more creative output in 2010! 1 comment|post comment

Las Ruinas del Corazon | Eric Gamalinda [14 Dec 2009|09:55am] polymexina Las Ruinas del Corazon | Eric Gamalinda Juana the Mad married the handsomest man in Spain and that was the end of it, because when you marry a man more beautiful than you, they say you pretty much lost control of the situation. Did she ever listen? No. When he was away annexing more kingdoms, she had horrible dreams of him being cut and blown away, or spread on the rack, or sleeping with exotic women. She prayed to the twin guardians of the Alhambra, Saint Ursula and Saint Susana, to send him home and make him stay forever. And they answered her prayers, and killed Philip the Handsome at twenty-eight. Juana the Mad was beside herself with grief, and she wrapped his body in oils and lavender, and laid him out in a casket of lead, and built a marble effigy of the young monarch in sleep, and beside it her own dead figure, so he would never think he was alone. And she kept his body beside her, and every day for the next twenty years, while pungent potions filled the rooms, she peeked into his coffin like a chef peeks into his pot, and memories of his young body woke her adamant desire. She wanted to possess him entirely, and since not even death may oppose the queen, she found a way to merge death and life by eating a piece of him, slowly, lovingly, until he was entirely in her being. She cut a finger and chewed the fragrant skin, then sliced thick portions of his once ruddy cheeks. Then she ate an ear, the side of a thigh, the solid muscles of the chest, then lunged for an eye, a kidney, part of the large intestine. Then she diced his penis and his pebble-like testicles and washed everything down with sweet jerez. Then she decided she was ready to die. But before she did, she asked the poets to record these moments in song, and the architects to carve the song in marble, and the marble to be extracted from the most secret veins of the earth and placed where no man could see it, because that is the nature of love, because one walks alone through the ruins of the heart, because the young must sleep with their eyes open, because the angels tremble from so much beauty, because memory moves in orbits of absence, because she holds her hands out in the rain, and rain remembers nothing, not even how it became itself. post comment

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