And before you ask, NO, I have not finished the new layout. And before Chris asks, I still don’t know how to make Cosmic available to anyone but me, so… yeah, to finish another brief paragraph lamely.

OH!! I got a puppy. Please look. He’s adorable.

My puppy, Finn.

My god. How friggin’ cute could he be?

Anyway, the latest news I have to offer (until I come up with some real content) was posted by Professor Jason Mittell of Middlebury College. Yeah, I went to school with Vlad and friend Boris.

I believe I made some promises about recent concerting activities. GREAT BIG SEA IS SO FANTASTIC.

Really, that’s all I can think to say. It was a great show, and I am very pleased with myself (for no good reason) because I got to see the b’ys twice in one summer. Okay, Ottawa perhaps rocked a little harder, but it’s not fair to compare the Majestic in the Madcity with Ottawa Bluesfest.

I am so going to try to make it to their two-night rockfest in Chicago in March.

Blargh! I haven’t been geeking in any self-conscious way for a bit, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something. Like, soon. Big doings at Eastern on Saturday… squee!

Me and my hopeless crush on Sean McCann. I will probably yammer about that later, too.

Time has been eaten: further work on CSS tutorial (parts II-V… crap) and new style for k2 (double crap) pending.

I have a suspicion that my sorry little sandbox is going to undergo a revamp. Again. And possibly soon.

Bwahahahaha.

Athainel, also known as Ignacio Valenti.

D’chae, also known as Jamie Bamber.

Thus is my geek status forever assured.

Naturally, as soon as I made that statement, I realized that it wasn’t true. Whoopsie.

My total geekery has taken a slightly different form in the past few weeks, I guess. I’m still really enjoying Eastern Weyr, of course, and acquiring my own set of characters I really enjoy (one is such a crossover dork trip), and I’m looking into some other related fandom misadventure. But my renewed interest in Pern fandom inspired me to pick up Dragonflight and Dragonquest again. Having read those two books, I don’t think I have any desire to keep rereading through the (still-growing) canon. My memory of my sixteen-year-old self’s reaction was accurate: yeah, it worked when I was thirteen, but the writing doesn’t hold up to the world the novels contain.

It’s sort of the same experience I had with the Harry Potter series, though I know it’s heretical. I got into an argument with a certain monsieur not too long ago about the relative quality (if, as the prevarication went, there is such a thing) of the touchstone youth books. The argument runs that if you admit the world is engaging (I do) and if you can read 700 pages in one sitting (I did, saving unavoidable obstacles), then how is the piece not “good literature”? For the time, I’ll drop that descriptor. It’s useless, and feeds back into the image of a pure literary canon, a metaphorical room of fixed size containing a fixed number of busts of a fixed set of authors and their works. Dead dull, right? I mean, even for those of us who regularly and happily engage with Shakespeare. The issue I take with the Harry Potter books, however, is much the same as with the Pern series: though I enjoy the worlds in which they take place, and though I read the books avidly and quickly, and though I have been engaged, I do not leave as engaged as I’d like. I dismiss Harry and his compatriots. The most interesting character was Snape . . . until he was explained. Then he became a bit of a shell, though he remained fuller in aspect and in retention of my interest than the rest. I take nothing from the characters. I take nothing from the story. I leave with a world, which is fine, but when the whole lacks resonance, you’re left with . . . well, shit, you’re left with the first two Harry Potter movies!

Pern fares slightly better, perhaps partly because the world caught me when I was at the right age (for me, eleven to thirteen or thereabouts). There’s a problem in that age assumption, though: I can still situate myself in Pern. It’s not half so narrow in scope. Where would I want to be in Harry Potter’s world? Fighting Voldemort? Attending Hogwarts? Not for me.

I can sense that I’m rambling beyond my normal bounds of nonsensical, so I’ll stop.

We should all just read Agatha Christie and John Donne until we die.

That’s right. I’m in Pern fandom all over again.

I had a brief love affair with a few Weyrs last summer, then moved on to a couple others in the fall, but I wasn’t able to sustain anything. None of them were quite right. Now I’m over at Eastern Weyr and having a ball. It’s… er… well, it’s just the right size!

In all seriousness, it is the right size. With about twenty active members (don’t quote me on that), Eastern is manageable even for those of us who cut our teeth on the now practically outdated full-post style of PBEMs. I liked Arolos—honest I did—but it was simply too huge (possibly also too full of LCD writers, and BOY do I feel awful for saying that) for me to handle. Any time literally hundreds of messages can come through in a day, I’d say it’s trouble. I certainly wasn’t able to keep up with everything (even if it felt like I could barely get someone to do a vaguely interesting thread with me), and I very much doubted the BoD was. Moreover, in such a huge club with such a huge, devoted membership, it’s kind of tough to reward your players. I mean, let’s face it: rankers are rankers, and a big, shiny dragon beats just about everything. Sure, there are the Craftmasters, the Wingleaders, but there is almost no one who doesn’t want to be either Weyrleader or a goldrider. When there isn’t enough turnover in the membership, there isn’t enough turnover in the game. It reflects the social structure of the Weyr a little to vividly: a few very important people and a thousand scurrying ants. Situation only gets rougher when there’s no BoD turnover (and how often do clubs change their leadership by election these days?), either.

Eastern is small. Eastern is active. Eastern is full of interesting, capable writers. It’s like heaven for a geek like me. I’m still finding it a shade slow, but there are other little clubs out there that could use a boost. Okay, sure, it would definitely help if I had webbie duties or some other BoD-like position, but I’ve been so thoroughly screwed in those so many times that I pretty much hate to ask the fateful question: Can I help? How much fun is it to be an “Assistant Webbie” and do 100% of the day-to-day? Blecch.

The old itch is coming back, though, much as I hate to admit it. I want to take my compendium of knowledge (partially available over in PBEM RPG Resource-land) and turn it into a really well-run, comfortable Weyr.

Yeah, not gonna happen.

This is one of the many pahoehoe lava flows on Hawai’i. It’s right off the Saddle Road between the two big volcanoes, and if you take the tour up Mauna Kea (which we did because they feed you, provide parkas, and answer all the questions you’d think to ask), you get to hop out of the bus and tramp around on this nifty basalt.

Two thirds of the way up Mauna Kea on the mostly uber-bumpy access road, you get this gorgeous view of a red cinder cone against all the clouds from the island’s tropical inversion patterns (also currently from Kilauea’s very active steam vent). A’a lava from Mauna Kea in the foreground, the eastern side of the island barely visible through the clouds behind the cinder cone.

Not quite at the actual top of Mauna Kea is a collection of domes and dishes that are part of the earth-based astronomical hot-spot in the world. It’s pretty damn awesome. The top of Mauna Kea, a sacred place for the Hawaiians, is in the background.

The sun setting from the mountain with three telescopes in silhouette (I think they’re Subaru and Keck twins from left to right). Out of frame are Hualalai and Haleakala peeking out of the clouds.

This is the shadow of Mauna Kea on the clouds to the east as the sun set. Major wow.

Mom, dad, me, and Derek in front of the Gemini North telescope at twilight. Those parkas were definitely necessary. It’s chilly at 13,000 feet, but the whole experience was so cool that it didn’t matter a bit.

More to come!

There is some likelihood, however, that I’ll go on a tear about my senior thesis at some point or another. Be prepared!

Briefly back to the original focus on design… Instant Color Schemes is my new favorite toy. I got some really lovely schemes by searching for terms like “blankets” and “horse pasture.” Now we know what kind of stuff matters to me.