In + Finem + Omnia

I went to see Godzilla -0.0 yesterday evening (LOVED it). I didn't want to follow the results.... And I didn't check them until the movie ended at 1 am. HOLY SHIT wow! Georgia ... wow :D I was so worried that jackass Rick Jackson was going to be governor. Oh, what a relief.

Alright. Um, in terms of progress, I advance quite a bit. I completed 2nd round revisions for 5 out of 10 chapters so far. Of the remaining chapters, the first three are short, the last two are long - sigh. I want to complete this entire round of revisions by the weekend and I believe it's possible if I simply don't do anything else. I'm thoroughly amused at how strong these chapters have been. They're not ready to post as they are for reasons. After these revisions, I'll go through them, one by one, until I finalize them. For that I'll take my time. AO3 won't be ready to go live anytime soon so what's the hurry anyhow?

Tangentially - I want to write drabbles again when I'm not working on this Avatar/Backrooms stuff.

Anything else? My two programming projects also advanced.

First, I completed my documentation of the MOS 6502 assembler I put together last year. All of it done by hand because of course I'm a geek. And every line of every routine is essentially documented. Eventually I want to transform that into a book ala Richard Mansfield's "The Second Book of Machine Language" which, to be fair, is what inspired my assembler.

Second, my self-imposed grading project chugs along at its glacial pace. I'm on the verge of completing a body of functions in machine language that replicate parts of C64 BASIC. The parts that remain 'to do' are functions for file operations (open, close, input, output).

I want to post more about this ancient style of programming generally. I talked about it a couple of times only briefly. Just to go into how an assembler works, I need to get into the dirty details of the CPU, the instruction set, addressing, etc. It's overwhelming so I need to stop myself. Hah, I got to be systematic about this.

OK, I'm sleepy AF, that's enough.

I woke up feeling strangely today. It wasn't ye olde blood sugar - that's its own brand of strangely. Got to be the weather. Alright, so, that aside I was productive today. I'm only three pages away from my first (of several) revisions to chapter 21. Normally, I'd just go back again and again until there's nothing left to agonize about. I've got 9 more of these chapters to go plus ... AO3 is down so it's not like I've got this schedule to maintain. So what I'm going to do is give each chapter a top to bottom revision then circle back to where I started. Then I'll nurse the chapters individually until either I can't take it anymore or, um, miraculously they transform into something that's postable.

I had to construct this (not) entirely from scratch - I used the version I put together for bluesky:

( ... from facebook ... )

01. Name all the orange items in the room you are in.

Hmmm, do I have any? Looks like a video signal converter, a binder, and maybe 8 books.


02. What's your favorite fall treat?

A slice of sizzling hot blonde with maple syrup and ice cream.


03. What's your favorite Halloween candy?

Those tiny chocolate bar thingies.


04. What's your favorite scary/horror movie?

Blair Witch Project; the only flick that's ever actually scared me LOL


05. What are you doing on October 31?

Sitting at home, doing on-line stuff, procrastinating....

OK, def for sure I will be typing those last two chapters this weekend. AO3 is down ... so it's not like there's a rush to post anything. But I've got to keep going. I need to get at least 50% of the Avatar/Backrooms done in a year's worth of writing. Or, I donno, madness?

Anyway, today I spent my time on a program to 'automate' HTML formatting for my fics. I'm using LabVIEW for this plus e-pub downloads of my fics I saved prior to the great off-line-ing. It's agony but with that tool I posted 1/4 of my Reflections of an Ash Desert. The agony how to parse the HTML text to split the chapter name, summary, and text cleanly from the source. And then re-combining them into the HTML style that I've adopted for my work here. Once I get this to work correctly, I'll use it to post my other Avatar work which is so much larger ... and stranger.

First, I can't believe Sir Patrick Stewart is gone. The first of the TNG crew to leave. It doesn't make sense to me. Like there's this void.

Second, AO3 is down and may be down for a month. :sigh: f'ing hackers. I'm glad they caught this early and I'm glad they're taking the time to address it properly. Don't rush, y'all.

Third, welp, what ever I've got, I'm getting better, slowly. Didn't go to the work the last two days. I won't today either. Yesterday, I didn't get a single word written but it wasn't a complete loss. I still advanced my other, technical projects. Today, for sure, I'm taking a crack at the 29th and 30th chapters. They're long, long chapters but all I have to do is type. Once I've got them all saved as documents, that's when I start the actual editing process. That'll consume my time for the next four weeks, yup.

Also going to try my hand at more of these Blanket Boxes when I need to keep myself busy. I've gotten a lot better with DW and HTML and everything. It's coming back to me.

Regal is selling this Whalefall Popcorn Container:



Ha, you don't fool me, I saw that movie and I know what happens inside that whale! I'm not eating no popcorn from that LOL

 Unknown Origin, reposted at pillowfortu_haul 

Q: How many jobs have you had, and which was your favorite? Hmmm, they've all been academic jobs. I'd say 7. My favorite has to be my post doc position; I got to live in Colorado and program computers all the live long day? sigh me up for that

Q: When did you first connect to other people via computers? Highschool, junior or senior years so 1995? It was thru BBS and er that was a phone bill for sure....

Q: Were/are you on AOL? Compuserve? LJ? Dreamwidth? A Listserv? Other? MSN; then I did LJ and DW. I did have an AOL account for the messenger service.

Q: If you went to college, does your major match your career/current job? Yes.

Q: Have you had a mammogram? Colonoscopy? Nope to either.

Q: When did you get your first cell phone? What was it like? (Did it have a screen? Could you text? Was it a brick or flip?) Oh goodness I'd say 2000? I legit don't remember. It was a flip phone; a Casio model; only calls. And really, really large.

Q: When did your family first acquire a color TV? I want to say 1982. It was a Zenith.

Q: When did your family acquire a second TV? I want to say 1983 or 84? I just remembered; it was a tiny Panasonic? B&W model for my grandma.

Q: Did you ever own “designer jeans”? No.

Q: Have you ever been to a disco? No.

Q: How many places (towns, states, countries) have you lived in? Countries 2. States 4. Towns 7.

Q: Have any of your contemporary friends died? (i.e., people more or less your age.) I know of several FB friends who have; in RL one of my cousins only a few years older than me, died some 20 years ago.

Q: Are you parents still living? Yes.

Q: Do you have any gray hairs? Oh lord.

Q: Did you or your family own a Betamax? No just VHS - top loader too.

Q: How did you spend New Year’s Eve 1999/2000? Agonizing about my grades probs.

Q: What’s the oldest article of clothing you still wear? A Spyder snow jacket that's pushing 20 years. I wear it once in a while. Still the best jacket I've ever owned.

Q: Do you eat your vegetables? Yes.

Q: Are the privileges of adulthood worth the responsibilities? Um, no. Nothing is worth this.

Q: Do you feel like an adult? No! Why? Gross!

Q: Is youth wasted on the young? What?

Yesterday was a mixed bag. I typed two chapters of my 2nd draft (yay!). I absolutely adore the way Varang is. And to think her best chapters are yet to come. I hope that I keep this energy going for that. I know Avatar and the Backrooms is niche AF (the other Avatar, yes). I know that Avatar x Backrooms is probs unheard of. So I'm just writing this nonsense for me at this point. I'm relying on this ADHD hyper focus of mine to keep me going LOL.

Aside: I suppose it's due to the new Avatar (the other other Avatar, LOL) Seven Havens and the Avatar Aang 'movie' they fumbled, welp, somehow my other other Avatar works are getting kudos again at AO3. Not a complaint.

Ah, and then there's the other thing I did yesterday that's bummed me out. I tracked down my LJ and got access to it again. How is that blog even alive considering how gay it was? I don't understand even how the site as a whole remains 'functional' in any capacity. I started to go through my old entries. Ah, yikes, wow, twenty plus years of my nonsense. So many communities and friends lost to time. Yeah, I probably shouldn't have walked through memory lane like that but with the impending doom of PillowFort I simply had to see what if anything remained.

I need to track down my old friends from there, though. I know many moved on to other fandoms and lives and everything else. And now I'm just depressing myself again.

OK - when I finally get to the office, I'm going to type more chapters and maybe blog about the C64 again - sorry to anyone who rolls their eyes at assembly programming hahahah but it is fun in such a neat way.