My enviable dilemma for the evening is to either watch another episode of my new favorite show, The Dresden Files on SciFi (via Itunes), or read more of Austenland, by Shannon Hale (I managed to grab an ARC at ALA Midwinter). I must say, this show is awesome. Harry Dresden is a wizard. A wizard who lives in modern-day Chicago.
It’s like Law and Order, only with wizards. 
Seriously. Only better.
And that’s coming from a L&O fan.
He gets into situations where he has to deal with cops–crimes involving supernatural things, like werewolves and hellions and crows that are really weird magical beings. But he can’t tell anyone who doesn’t already know about the supernatural anything about what’s going on, so it puts him in some interesting situations, having to solve problems on his own or get into situations where he might get arrested for what he’s doing.
Very good. It’s apparently based on books by the same name, but I’ve never read them myself. Anyone else read them?
By the way, this show is a great answer to a recent commen
t by Scott Westerfeld in an interview in Locus. Oh, it must have been six months or more now. He said that whenever he travels to a new country the first thing he does is turn on the TV, but then he’s utterly bored or disappointed, I can’t remember his words, if the show is just a cop show or a drama without anything supernatural. I remember him saying that he looks at a L&O kind of show and hopes that the lawyer is going to sprout wings or throw a fireball or something. Well, here’s the show for him. 🙂
And Cindy, if you’re reading this, yes, Shannon Hale + Jane Austen. You’re on the list of people to borrow it after my coworker, who I stole it back from tonight to read.
ETA: BTW, Dresden Files is set in Chicago! I love Chicago.

This has made me giggle every time I’ve seen it for the last … SIX years. That’s how long it’s been since I worked at the trade magazine in Chicago where this was in a trade publication the magazine received. That’s how funny this ad is.

If you can’t read the text under the photo, this is what it says:

That’s right, you can reach 55,000 software developers with your advertising message and get a free cat to boot. We’re talking genuine felines with shots, spayed, declawed–the whole nine yards.

Just call 800-GET-A-CAT and we’ll ship immediately. Just let us know how to ship

______UPS
______UPS Blue Label
______Overnight
______Bulk Mail

Advertise today. (415) 397-1881. We’re standing by ready to punch holes in boxes.

Now, issues of declawing aside (my pos
ition: I’m against it. I think it’s cruel.), I just LOVE this ad! Especially the half-cat shooting into the air.

Aha, I googled it and found this:

The 800-number is phony.

And when you call Carl at the 415-number also listed in the ad, he tells you he really doesn’t have cats to give away.

The only giveaway is his pet cat Kazoo. In the ad, Kazoo is pictured twice, once sitting on top of a pedestal, and a second time, from the neck down, with a Federal Express and Special Delivery tag pasted on his stomach.

“It’s just a joke,” Landau says from his San Francisco office. “I wanted to get rid of my cat. That’s all.”

Sad, poor kitty–he really did want to get rid of the cat. But a most hilarious ad. Memorable, too.

I just got to give a tour to

howardtayler

(of Schlock Mercenary) and

sandratayler 

and their awesome kids. They’re in town for the Emerald City Comicon–which is this weekend, if it somehow slipped your memory, so if you’re going, stop by the Blank Label booth to talk to them. 

All the kids knew so much about making books that I didn’t have to tell them all the boring details–instead we got to the fun stuff. And they all love reading enough that it was gratifying to see how interested they were in our books. The most fun part was bringing them to the desk of our art director, who had a couple sample sketches from A Practical Guide to Monsters on hand and was able to tell them how they ask artists for sketches then comission finished art, and then finally how everything goes into the book. (The kids have A Practical Guide to Dragons, so I hope it was fun for them to see how the next book was progressing.) It looked like it was especially interesting to their nearly-12-year-old daughter (codename Kiki, I think?) who had all sorts of questions about the process. Perhaps a future art director? (Or artist, given her family!)

Of course, the next most fun part is always at the end of the tour when I have free stuff to give away, and today happened to be a good day for that–our receptionist happened to have a whole bunch of NeoPets and DuelMasters, not to mention many handfuls of Magic cards. (Sometimes she gets damaged boxes, that sort of thing.) I also wanted to get some minis to give to Howard and Sandra, but due to the afternoon receptionist being on jury duty the product room was closed. Never fear, the good people of Wizards came to the rescue and I had offers of more minis than I could use, and Howard went away with as big a smile as his kids. I love how the things my company does makes people smile!

So thanks for coming, Taylers! I had a great time showing you around.

Also along for the tours were two Dans–one, a friend of the Taylers with whom they’re staying while in town for the Emerald City Comic Con, the other was my friend Fellfrosch, in town coincidentally on the same day because he happened to be interviewing here at Wizards in a different department. My Evil Plan to convince all my friends to move to wherever I live is going to succeed, I just know it! (Okay, so that’s just one person and his family so far, and that’s if he gets the job. But another friend applied for a job out here recently, too, and several other friends say they want to end up in this area, so you never know–within a few years… 🙂 )

Thanks to everyone who gave me ideas in the last thread. You’re all thinking about what I was thinking, and you gave me some great examples. 
I’m done, done, done with my last apartment. Got my vacuum back (though not my broom and dustpan) and got the kitchen clean. Done. Never going to live in an apartment complex ever again. Too much gambling on whether your neighbor will be a smoker and whether the management and maintenance will be competent, and usually way overpriced anyway.
Currently putting together those thoughts on fantasy–both the idea of it being all around us and the evolution of folk/fairy tales and mythology through fantastic stories all the way back to Beowulf and A Midsummer Night’s Dream through the Victorians and up to today. It’s really amazing how fantasy really is a part of most cultures and their storytelling. And then there was what’s his name in the Victorian era who consigned fantasy to the nursery… James? Yes, Henry James. We talked about it a bit in my Victorian class in grad school. It was a complete cultural shift, in my opinion, in people’s overt opinion
s of “fantasy” the large concept, but it’s so interesting how it’s still pretty much infused in our culture.

Just a quick drive-by to say that there will be no post of substance today because ARRRgh and GRRRRR, my old apartment complex totally sucks. Went back tonight to finish the last of my cleaning and take out my vacuum and cleaning supplies. And when I arrived, they were gone.

ARrrrrrrrgh.

At this rate I’m going to go be a pirate. (Speaking of which, if you’ve never heard the song The Last Saskatchewan Pirate, you must. Even two or three years after hearing it the first time I laugh out loud when I hear it. It’s here, link in the middle of the page, if you’re interested in hearing it.)

Now I’m off to put together some thoughts on the evolution of fantasy and fantasy in pop culture. Open thread portion: tell me about where you see fantasy and the fantastic in pop culture. For someone who doesn’t read fantasy, where in their
normal everyday life would you tell them they’re already seeing it? Popular movies? Folklore and fairy tales? Disney movies? What else?

Does anyone out there–teachers, librarians, writers, readers–remember the Endless Quest books? Anyone out there read them as a kid? If so, can you shoot me an email at stacy l whitman AT gmail DOT com, or just comment here? (take out the spaces, of course)

I’ve started a mirror blog at http://slwhitman.blogspot.com just as an experiment. I’m not sure why. Mainly I hoped to try out Windows Live Writer and its ability to post to two blogs at once. I thought I might post to my MySpace blog at the same time as my Livejournal, but I can’t seem to figure out how to get it to do that. Perhaps it just doesn’t support MySpace. (

mistborn

, if you know how to make it do that, let me know!)

Hm, that brings up the question of LJ-specific code in a post copied to another blog platform.

Also, though, Blogger has some capabilities LJ doesn’t, such as being able to use a sitemeter to not only track where visitors are, but also how they came to your site, such as Google searches. That takes javascript, which LJ doesn’t allow.

Probably unnecessary, but I’m having fun experimenting. 🙂

 Oh, and a picture from my jaunt with a friend to Ravenna Park this afternoon. We were trying to get some shots for the weekly contest at Photogamer.com. This week the challenge is to go someplace new and take pictures of five things they give you a list of to search out.

I don’t think I”m going to bother to get a Flickr account tonight in time to turn in my shots, mainly because I didn’t quite understand the full meaning of the challenge. For example, for #5, Up, I didn’t realize you were supposed to do a straight up-from-the-ground shot. And I wouldn’t have done it, either, because the ground was pretty muddy. Too
bad I didn’t get a shot of Cindy’s shoes, which showed full evidence of her afternoon at two parks. I did, however, get a shot of Cindy herself.

For “play,” we saw a couple who was throwing a ball to their dog. My lovely new camera has continuous shooting, so “play” is not only me playing with my new camera, but a series of blurry shots of a dog playing with a red ball, behind the cut for the faint of bandwidth:

Oh, and we also saw a shirt that someone seemed to have thrown in a tree. We figured they must have thrown it from the bridge above, because it was reaaaally far up there to have thrown it from below.

This is the bridge they must have thrown it from. See? Pretty far up there.

I do like the drag-and-drop feature of Live Writer, letting me just drag pictures from the folder to the post. I can’t stand having to browse for every single picture. I’ll reserve final judgement until seeing the final product, though, because who knows how it will process the picture upload. Will it only upload the thumbnails for the post, or a larger size that people can click on? How will LJ handle that differently from Blogger?

I saw several other interesting things at the park, including a girl playing with juggling sticks that I couldn’t get a good shot of, and several signs I played with getting interesting angles of, though showing you the pictures will have to wait for a different post, because it’s 11:47 and I still haven’t done laundry yet for the week.

After our walk in the park, Cindy and I went to Literary Night at church, a yearly tradition for about 13 years. I wasn’t going to go, but I’m glad we went, muddy jeans and all. Though the quality can vary widely, there were several pieces that were by degrees funny (on purpose), touching, poetic (and when the poetry is actually poetic at an amateur night, that’s saying something), and narrative. One selection was even a children’s book, by, it turns out, one of the committee members of
the local SCBWI. I’m sure she and I will run into each other again next month at the western Washington SCBWI conference. Small world.

ETA:

Verdict: That sucked. It wouldn’t publish them both at once–I had to switch between the two. Okay, doable, since it saves your text. But then it wouldn’t let me upload the pictures–I had to input a lot of FTP info and such, and hey, might as well use my FTP client for that (though perhaps if I’d uploaded the pictures to my gallery first and then used the links as imgsrc tags, it might have still worked. That’s the plan I have every time, because I want to keep my portfolio up to date, and then I get lazy and just upload straight to LJ). So I didn’t even end up sending the post to the Blogger account. 

Also, it (Live Writer, I mean) won’t directly support LJ tags such as lj user and lj-cut, two codes I use frequently. Not to mention the inability to switch usericons. Perhaps I should have tried to post straight HTML rather than WYSIWIG, but I’ve heard that WYSIWIG is the whole reason people like Live Writer.

Anyway, probably not for me. I think I’ll stick with LJ straight up. I like the interface (though I would love a drag and drop feature for adding pictures!) and it’s less complicated. And I find that I’m just getting adult content invites from MySpace latel
y–ugh. I might try it a few more times just to see if perhaps it might grow on me.

I can totally see my coworkers doing something like this. We’re a quirky bunch, as you can imagine–I mean, really, what do you expect when you work in a whole company of gamers and book nerds? Book nerds… ah, that’s why:

Thanks to Fuse #8 for the link.

Anybody have experience with both of these? I can’t use LibraryThing’s widgets on my LJ because they’re javascript. Goodreads.com’s widget is HTML, but appears to be too large for my sidebar. At least both of them lets you import and export Excel files–I was able to export the 150-something books(that  I’d entered painstakingly by hand) from Librarything over to Goodreads within minutes. Even though it’s easy to look up a book by ISBN in either, it still ends up being an hours-long process when you have thousands of books. The 150 books in my LibraryThing and now in Goodreads are just the tip of the iceberg, what I had the time to enter that one day in October. (And I haven’t gone back to LibraryThing since, mainly because I realized how useless it is for someone with an LJ if I wanted to embed the code in my sidebar as a “look what I’m reading” sort of thing.)

But I don’t like the Goodreads’ “look what I’m reading” thing any more, being all text. Which is why I started coding my own, because it’s prettier. But that also means it’s more cumbersome.

Anybody on LJ have experience with something like these services that works on LJ?

Thanks to

davidlubar

, who helped me get my new icon down to the right file size to upload to LJ. I have no idea why Photoshop was making it so large, but I have a great icon now however it happened!

Speaking of Mogget (the subject of my new icon), I’ve been unpacking and the cats have been wandering around the house. Like I said in my last post, Mogget has been wandering around outside my bedroom, which is good. Except… though he’s gotten mostly used to Nikki, he doesn’t quite like the other two roommates–he hasn’t seen them often enough because they live upstairs.

So this afternoon I picked him up to show him where his food was (
I’d just moved it from my bedroom out to the dining room), when one of the girls upstairs came down. In his fright, Mogget totally clawed me for the second time today. The first was … I forget why. Some loud noise or something. Argh. Anyway, he’s doing better, but my arms are feeling the worse for wear. At least he’s out in the living room and dining room checking things out now!

I’ve organized so much today and I feel all proud of myself. But in all my organizing, my room looks the same. You know how that goes–you put ten boxes away, but then bring ten more out that need unpacking next? That’s the stage I’m in. At least my closet is all organized, though–I can find my towels! I can find my food in the kitchen! It’s amazing!