Astonishment.

Who thinks I have what it takes to be an airline steward? And why, or why not?

Me for the win!

You scored as Captain Jack Sparrow. Roguish,quick-witted, and incredibly lucky, Jack Sparrow is a pirate who sometimes ends up being a hero, against his better judgement. Captain Jack looks out for #1, but he can be counted on (usually) to do the right thing. He has an incredibly persuasive tongue, a mind that borders on genius or insanity, and an incredible talent for getting into trouble and getting out of it. Maybe its brains, maybe its genius, or maybe its just plain luck. Or maybe a mixture of all three. Captain Jack Sparrow 71% The Terminator 67% James Bond, Agent 007 58% Lara Croft 50% Indiana Jones 46% Batman, the Dark Knight 46% Maximus 42% Neo, the "One" 38% El Zorro 33% William Wallace 33% The Amazing Spider-Man 33% Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0 created with QuizFarm.com

FurRag - beta.

"Hey Osfer, have you been a big dirty slacker lately? I haven't seen you post anything--no stories, no LJ posts... have you turned lazy and unambitious?"

Haha, no. Aside from the fact that I'm courting two prospective employers in the real world and that I've been offered a job as editor of a fairly well-known furry publication, aside from the fact that I've started the first of a series of five NaNoWriMo writing workshops I'm giving, aside from the fact that I'm participating in this madness with the full intention of getting the result published--I've been working on a project.

Yes, yes, I know, "you and your fucking projects", but listen, this is a doozy. A sweet and talented coder friend sacrificed way too much of his free time to make some of my more frivolous dreams come true, while the fabulously talented Kamui contributed reams of artwork and the result is this:

FurRag, the definitive furry fiction archive (beta).

Even at 15% of its planned functionality it's already on a par with the functions of just about every other fiction archive out there and there's tons more to come. Despite the fact that it isn't finished it's now been opened to help furry participants in the National Novel Writing Month through the nifty integrated per-chapter and full-story word count and forum integration functions.

Zawesomes, now?

October to November

After the Day of the Dead comes All Hallow's, or Hallowmas or Sammy
Haine or whatever poncy name is given to good old Halloween. For those
three mice and two squirrels that didn't get spammed by me yet, FANG's Halloween edition is out and an early bird who orders now can still have it in time for the Dread Eve.



Yeah, I know. Months with no updates, and then spam? Just wait. There's more.



These past months, together with an old friend and brilliant coder whom
I won't name unless he says it's okay I've been developing a new story
archive, a rather ambitious undertaking that will take quite some time
to fully develop. However, since it offers some functionality eminently
suited to NaNoWriMo a beta version will be made available to the public specifically for use during NaNo.

Should be good fun!

Black and blue teeth.

Dark stains on my fingers and my front teeth, illegible, light grey scribblings on a blank sheet of paper, a wad of tissue paper in the waste basket. A sense of humble achievement.
I pick up a box of cartridges and discard it--wrong kind. I pick up another, nod approvingly and, flicking it open with a thumb, empty it into my hand. Ammunition spills over my fingers, cartridges clattering to the floor, but I pay them no mind. I only need one. I slide it into the mechanism--a solid click--and seal my weapon, ready to fire.

The spare, then, my holdout. Quickly I whip it out, this second, no different from the first but for its colour. It, too, fails me, and I am lost.
Or I would be, were the situation quite so urgent. As it is, I've no adversary in need of smiting. nor am I in danger of being smote myself. But it's important to be ready, and it's plain that I am not. This must immediately be remedied.
I gather my tools and spread them out on the desk and carefully, I dismantle my armaments. I set the pieces apart, on a cloth so they won't roll or slip or otherwise vanish, as small things are wont to do when no-one's looking. I check the cartridges, toss them away and exchange them for new ones. I try again--and again, nothing.

At this point I should make it clear that I'm talking about pens, not guns. The metaphor was nice, so far, but I really can't keep it up. So, pens. Fountain pens, to be precise, implements d'ecriture which I haven't used in a while, having favoured such scribbling tools as the extremely pocketable Lamy Pico, which, for all its portability, is still just an average ball point pen, and a very nice and super-cheap home-brand 0.7 mm rollerball in a luscious dark blue that looks simply sublime on cream paper. Or, in cases where I'm feeling particularly unsure, a mechanical pencil which is styles after a scalpel, to look really clever.

I am, you may observe, something of an enthusiast of old-school longhand. It's a craft I haven't practiced much, a fact which has a chicken-and-egg relationship with the very low legibility of my chickenscratch. As a wee lad I spent my modest pocket-money on pens and markers of different qualities, none of which I ever managed to use to depletion, but which I kept organised in my overstuffed pen box at school, systematically employing different tools for different tasks. Of course, it may also be that I was a spendthrift child with hamstering tendencies, which isn't abnormal, who was so geeky as to be unable to think of anything better to hamster than pens.

In gasps and hiccups, my delight in handwriting has resurged in the last few years. The grudging admission that a PDA simply can't function properly as a data entry device for text, even when equipped with a cute little keyboard led to my stomping off to buy a fucking notebook, and the urge to find the very awesomest notebook available.
This led me, of course, to the moleskine. Which of course needed a suitable writing implement to complement it.
Trial and error in shops (the great advantage with having an obsession with stationery rather than, say, vintage cars is that it's a far less costly love-affair) and on-line research showed that, curiously, it was the cheap home-brand rollerball that was most suited to the moleskine's creamy paper, which brought out the radiant gold in the dark blue ink to make the text truly shine, giving the permanent illusion of wet ink--despite the fact that the ink could withstand even a thorough scrubbing with a licked finger, once dry.
I nevertheless kept an arsenal of alternatives at hand, none of which, I'm now ashamed to say, were fountain pens. This was due to the fact that I selected the moleskine particularly for its ruggedness, to serve as a notebook-on-the-road, which could withstand the rigors of being jangled about in a loosely-packed bag all day and still offer the sturdiness to comfortably write in it even without a flat surface to lay it down on. And fountain pens simply aren't the implements you want to use when being jostled side to side on a train or bus or tram, as I so frequently am.

Still, those precious fountain pens beckoned me. Some two or three years old, the both of them, by no means ancient and priceless only in that they cost next to nothing at the time. Plain and nicely weighted, red and silver, and both, it turned out, thoroughly clogged.
Daunted I was not. Off to the bathroom I went with them, with a stash of tissue paper, a glass and (wisely) rolled-up sleeves. What followed was an hour of careful rinsing, patient dripping, a gradual raising of the temperature, drying, soaking... Not of the whole pens, of course, only of the nib, made, as most fountain pens are, of iridium.
A Platinum Group Metal, iridium is hard and brittle, tough to machine, and the most corrosion-resistant metal known. Given that it's also fairly cheap, this makes it an excellent metal for making pen nibs, which (ideally) are permanently exposed to some fluids. This marvelous metal is fairly rare, having come to our lonely little planet either as a sediment from the cosmic dust that constantly drizzles onto our little globe or, more cataclysmically, as a major constituent of some meteorites, such as that found by the Alvarezes in the late '70s in clay around the K-T Boundary, which became one of the major proofs for the theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite.
Ah, but I digress somewhat.
Not that the above isn't interesting--more interesting, at the very very least, than sucking warm water through a fountain pen nib and spitting out the blackened result into the sink. The staying power of that dried, cloying ink, utterly perplexes me.
Of the two nibs, one could be saved; the other, despite my efforts remains uncooperative. The rescued pen is quite weak, still, the presence of minuscule amounts of water in the capillaries causing the ink to be quite pale on paper, but in time, she will heal (the pen is called Martha and is among the few women I have ever loved). Black ink had clogged her veins and I've put her on a diet of blue, so the faded ink is turning slowly from grey to lilac, with blue to follow some time later.

There is something inherently magical and terribly dangerous about writing by hand. There is a finality to what you write that engenders claustrophobia and performance anxiety, for while a well-written page is a work of art, the smallest blemish, the slightest falter can ruin its splendour. Not to mention that it's terribly hard to go back and make corrections. It's only ink on paper, but it might as well be chisel on marble, it's so final and to write anything longer than an essay on a topic you've already worked out, brain-wise, is terribly daunting.

Still. I think I'll give it a go. Just to get my handwriting in shape, and just to train my hand. Should the RSI (or Carpal Tunnel Syndrome) I occasionally suffer from in my right index and middle fingers flare to unbearable degrees, rendering me unfit to type for a year or more, I may have to turn to longhand ad my only alternative.

I shudder at the prospect, of course. But perhaps a year of the musty scent of paper and the satisfaction of black ink-stains on my fingertips is not so bleak a future.

Being a modest geek, my friends and I occasionally indulge in a night of role-playing. Nothing kinky, mind, just pen-and-paper stuff. Despite my long-ago-failed efforts to the contrary, no costumes or props are involved, only mirth and beverages.

One session, some years ago now, took place in the darkest of dark ages, the Middle Ages. I played a werewolf and so did my friends and together we wandered through a zombie-infested castle, dispatching dread beasts left and right. Ingvar, my werewolf, was nominally the leader of the group, but due to cursed dice he spent most of his time disabled. During the first round of combat against a horde of ROUSes he was trapped under a door, for example. Later he set a vampire free. He wasn't exactly the brains of the operation.

At one crucial point, a battle took place with, I believe, a mage of some sort. Ingvar rose to the occasion, brandishing whatever weapon he wielded with a great deal of vim, and was struck on the leg with a fireball, which the game master at the time informed me was 'bale fire'. Bale Fire, it turns out, is a type of fire straight from the Pit of Hell that takes its fuel from the Blooded Netherworld and therefore  can burn underwater or in space.

Shit, thought Ingvar, I'm in a tight spot!

He batted at his leg and, of course, his hands caught fire. His comrades were busy fighting the mage, so he had to take care of himself. Spotting a bed with linen sheets he ran for it, to use the sheets to douse the flames, to snuff them and deny them the oxygen they'd need to resurface. Against all odds, this failed and the bed turned into a Blazing Inferno. Again, thanks to cursed dice, Ingvar was subsequently unable to manage the monumental athletic feat of jumping off the bed, either.

 

All this very neatly becomes a metaphor for last night, when I finally got tired of the unwieldy forum system I'd implemented on www.osfer.com. I know, I thought, I'll just install a phpBB module for Mambo, my CMS. If you don't understand what that means, don't worry. I scarcely understand myself sometimes.

Off I toddled, wrestling with a very inconvenient yet still highly rated FTP client to get the module uploaded. Subsequently, it didn't do what I wanted and I found there was another module which would do what I wanted. I know, I thought, I'll just restore the backup I made before I started fiddling with the site.

I tried uploading the original files. I tried various ways of reloading the mysql database. I tried using my hosting provider's automatic backup restoration function, and with everything I tried the site became less and less functional and now, well, the bed is on fire and I can't jump off it.

So for the time being I'm just going to sit here and wait for competent help. I've sent a very polite and pleading mail to the good boys at my hosting service, asking them to magically and manually restore my site to the way it was yesterday. I feel like a cat stuck in a tree with the moon high overhead, meowing softly in hopes that keen firemen will bring me safely down.

 

Halloweeeeen stories deadline approaches!

Mount ye your flaming carriages, ride ye screeching across rooftops, delighting one and all with the wake of your blood-dimmed tide! The lowliest of holy nights draws nigh, with many a pumpkin deserving a gutting and many a child's tooth plotting its next cavity.

To quote that epic piece of serious, insightful and deeply moving dramatic cinema, "Starship Troopers": Are you doing your part?

Ten days remain until the deadline's close - September 30 - after which date, new submissions will not be considered for the upcoming FANG Halloween '05 issue which, considering the printer's slowness, should be available around October 20, leaving young and old ample time to obtain a copy in time for the around-the-fire-sitting and the sharing of scaaary tales.

Should you consider yourself lacking the skills needed for such a venture, surely you know of authors whose works you'd like to see printed. Mmm, in clear, carefully balanced print on crisp, off-white paper, properly weighted lettering and a cover whose gloss rivals that of many a lacquered death-mask... If you know or know of someone of such talents, you can do them a great service by dropping them a quick e-mail to inform them that FANG, the Little Black Book of Furry Fiction, is accepting Halloween- and horror-themed submissions of any rating and comfort level until September 30!

So polish up whatever you might have lying around until it gleams like the hook on the serial murderer's ragged arm-stump, or dip your quill in the blood of innocents and set it to parchment, and be swift as the raven while you're at it!