I like this for the abaya that I mention in one of the earlier scenes in Necropolis.Saturday, February 26, 2005
Matters of Costume
What do you think?
Iskandarah's meeting
If you were privy to this yesterday, you got to see a writer in action. It wasn't terribly exciting, I admit, and it was probably more prone to spelling and grammatical errors than Pamplona is to bovine life-forms. Anyway. I've moved the post. Check out excerpts, which is where it really belongs.
Installing AIM on Mom's Computer
We may finally get her off AOL!
Two Words
Hitch Hiker's!
"This must be a Thursday. I never could get a hang of Thursdays."
Seconds from Cairo
I've been silly.
Last Saturday, I was spending a couple of hours dithering and trying everything on in Gypsy Palace--See my Live Journal if you don't believe me. It's all in public posts. (whispers: It's the button on the left that says "Live Journal")--when I noticed a lovely brown caftan on sale for too much money and in a "me-unflattering" (as I'm sure that it flatters some one) shade of brown. It also had a tag with no English that said "Araba" and listed the size. Look, you'll have to trust me on the transliteration. I don't have pictures.
Anyway, too much Necropolis by Moonlight (where the main character spends much of her time in abaya, t-shirt, and jeans) and that dress made me want one.
Strangely, for less than the price of the dress in the Gypsy Palace, I'm getting two shipped in from Giza. One is shades of purple. I thought that the dark purple shaded to pale from the shoulders, but the picture they have on the website shows the opposite. I can't really say for certain what it was now that I come to try to think of it. All I can say is that dark purple to light purple in my imagination is prettier than in the picture. The other one--not a second and more expensive of the two--I don't remember at all. I tried to order two different, other ones, but the website said they were in some one else's cart. I seem to think it was olive green.
I'll post pics when I get them. I'd love to be able to get away with wearing them to work, but I think Celia might draw the line at what she is sure to take to be a night gown.
I'm also quite liking these abayas. It's quite the temptation to buy one of the less opulent black ones to wear as an over dress. Especially with the mandarin collars. They aren't quite so nightgown-ish. I really think no one would care.
Added Text to Excerpts
Thought I'd let you know. G'night.
Everyone is being nice for a change
I'm guessing that the text of my excerpts must have fallen in rankings on Google, because everyone is behaving themselves in my keyword/phrase searches. It's all clean, if you can get your mind around it. No interesting rope fetishes or anything. That tempts me to post something new. In fact, I know what it is that I have to post. The scene where Hassan is attempting to cut Jake's head off. That should be graphic enough. Plus, there's a rope involved. *wicked grin*
Now, there is an interesting thing that came up in my keywords. Some one was searching for Neferset this month. Who, besides me--and I didn't do it--would do that?
What does Necropolis by Moonlight have to do with the Castle Lesenvlk???
~or~ What is this character doing in that universe anyway?
Other than the immortal question of "Why are we here?"1, I find myself asking that question of me as I write more on "Necropolis by Moonlight." Friends, family, and fans2 probably know the basic plotline3. It has nothing whatever to do with In Sanguine and the entire cast of characters from the Gallow's Road gang4. It is set in a vaguely recognizeable modern Egypt, with characters who are vaguely recognizeable as modern people. Why then, other than the appearance of Merytamne5 in In Sanguine would I even suggest...
What, you forgot about the Viper? Tsk. Or the fact that young 'Than takes her first Carpathian bath in a converted Egyptian sarcofagus? (It happened. There is a scene, whether anyone reads it in context or not.)
It occured to me about half way through last year's edits that Jake and Der had more in common than I could easily explain if they were to be in different universes (which they once were). In fact, with the exception of the baroque Highwayman look on the one who is, in point of fact, a baroque period Highwayman, they could be twins. (Jake is a touch swarthier owing to his Greek mother.) There is, naturally, a way to explain it in the same universe, if you find it necessary. The former could easily be descended from the latter, with or without the interferance of a certain lupine lady6. No worries there.
The fact is, I like the non-historical non-Earth of In Sanguine more than I like the idea of setting Necropolis by Moonlight in the real modern world. We've already discussed changes in the world setting from reality. The reason why has a lot to do with my aging of In Sanguine's earth by about 300+ years.
Wait, you say? What about the wizards? How about the fact that travelling west at mid-summer will cause you to leave the dimension entirely?
I have an excerpt for that posted here. It is slated to form the background plotline for Thank Gods for Small Magicks. The loss of magick coupled with the healing of a major historical continuity error will self-correct a number of inconsistancies between earth history and non-earth non-history, which will, in turn, allow a number of advances to occur in a timely fashion. This does, however, destroy the world as the Gallows Road gang knows it. (Hence the reason why Gael tries to put a stop to it in Thank Gods.)
That was always the plan. Zag knows. Ask her if you don't believe me. It has a great deal to do with the somewhat late fall of Constantinople and the deaths of Derian Fiske and Anathandra Lesenvlk in the partly written novel, "Reprise."
Oh, does that bother you? Knowing that? Would you refuse to read a series where the main character's ends are already written? In that case, I urge you to read The Highwayman excerpt on this site. You should know better if you think death is the end for any of my characters.
I digress7. It was my intention to suggest from the very beginning that Merytamne was Anathandra's blood grandmother on her mother's side. (Her grandfather liberated a lady from the harem of the Caliph of Al Qahier, according to canonical In Sanguine. And, she mentions, off hand, to the "current," sitting Caliph that her grandmother was descended of the "poor fool" who took the Book of Thoth in the excerpt Al Qahier that you can read on this very site.
Merytamne is/always has been the ancestress of Alex's mother's family, although Derian de Rennic and Anathandra Lesenvlk are not in her branch of the family tree at all. Remember, Merytamne lived a *very* long time.
And that, my Lords and Ladies, is what Necropolis by Moonlight has to do with the Castle Lesenvlk. Only the connection between Jake and Derian is new.
- To clarify, why are we reading about this story on this web page, rather than the more esoteric versions of the question. I understand that philosophy 1001 might still have seats available if you wish to discuss the other.
- Fans: read "voyeurs" of a literary nature because I am certainly not well known enough to have acquired actual fans of the non-air moving variety. Why are you reading this, exactly, then? Is it the gratuitous use of voyeur in a foot note?
- For some reason the aforementioned sentance begs the continuation, "which is," whereby the writer begins to elaborate. Today the writer is being capricious and is not going to oblige.
- Gallow's Road gang: noun (proper) the slang term coined on 17th February 2005 at 2:08 AM for the loose conglameration of friends named in the In Sanguine stories. This list includes, canonically: Anathandra, Baroness Lesenvlk; Derian Fiske, sometimes Lord de Rennic; Angeline Damiani di Ravena; and Gael Warren.
- Merytamne: lit Mersankh Merytatanen, daughter of King Hatsuret and Lady Neferset, aka too many things to list.
- The aforementioned Lupine Lady would be 'Than Lesenvlk. Derian always was a bit of a man about town. I never thought a few wild oats were beyond the pale. Of course, the more I think about it, the more I am tempted to include the lupine lady as well. A relationship between 142nd-cousins shouldn't bother anyone, should it?
- I digress a lot. That would be why I had to make foot notes for this entry.
Oh Freddled Grunt Buggly
It does appear that Castle Lesenvlk at the Necropolis is a little hosed due to the updates. Apparently, everything is fine in M$ Internet Explorer, but not so in my native Safari. I will have to do some corrections to the css file in order to get it to load properly.
Covered the Forums too!
Well, as of this writing, the forums are fixed, CSSed, and in version 2.4. Just be aware of what buttons you take to them until I get "Links," "Events," and "Guestbook" polished up. Not that doing the css layout for those will be a chore. I just want any potential testers to have *something* left to compare the "new" layout to.
The Valley Gets a New Shroud
It's been a long time coming. Frankly, in the next few months, expect large amounts of this place to be rewritten, in spite of the fact that my efforts are probably better spent elsewhere. I'm taking a class in php and I very much like the language, as you've probably been able to tell for a while. (The Space Port and Castle Lesenvlk went to a php engine around two years ago. Since then, I've been adding lots of gnu public code and gradually learning how to do things myself.)
With the new php--in preparation for it, actually--we're changing layout to CSS. It needed to be done. Even I didn't like looking at the nested tables code. Plus, I used the 'Shadow as a test case to learn on. (I just never got it right, because I switched mid-code to The Space Port.)
I'm about halfway through with that part of the redesign. I've done "Home," "Costumes," "Journal," "Excerpts," and "Email." "Forums," "Events", "Links", and "Guestbook" are next.
What you can expect to go along with these updates:
- Where possible, the directory contained php scripts are going to get their template code from the same source.
- Upgrade to the new version of EasyForums.
- Possible upgrade of Mig for the Dragon*Con pics. It's solid and secure. Why reinvent the wheel if I don't have to?
- NecroNomicon 2004 pics gallery added to Mig
- New code for "Excerpts" will have a changeable background/font color for ease of reading.
- Excerpts will get a few new pieces from the increasing files for Necropolis by Moonlight.
- I'm going to customize that darned sig file on the guestbook.
- I'm rewriting Links. Sorry to say, the Add-a-link is going away. It hasn't taken near the abuse of my poor guestbooks, but I can't wait around for abuse to actually happen before I do something. Requests for links will be honored (within reason and a PG-13 rating) through email.
That's about it. If all goes well, these changes will (mostly) be invisible.
More word processors
The title url is NisusWriterExpress. I'm testing it currently and it doesn't seem that bad. Mariner Write, from yesterday's post, doesn't want to import either Word or AppleWorks, despite claims by the company that it can do both. It also doesn't seem to be interacting with MacLinkPlus at all.
What I would like to find is a grammar checker. None of the word processors I see around has one. That includes the program I currently use. Now, I have read and read and read about the fact that grammar checkers are "useless," but it seems to me that a grammar checker that underlines potential mistakes has a purpose. Namely, the I love Paris in the the spring error.
9 out of ten times, when formatted in a certain way, I won't see what's wrong with that sentance. It doesn't matter how often or long I proofread. And, trust me, I have tried everything, even text to speech, to attempt to find errors like that. The best thing is Word's green underlines. (As Text to Speech takes longer and feels clunky.)
So why, you ask, don't I just buy Word? To me, Word is an example of everything that is wrong with word processing apps. Yes, it has a few nice features, but for the most part it suffers from code bloat. The current version of Word takes about 40 megs just to open up. That's half the size of my first hard drive. While computers have gone leaps and bounds since my old 16mhz Mac Performa, it strikes me that Word Processing has not changed all that much since 1993. (Tons since 1983, though.) Why does a function that used to take 4 megs of ram have to take 40? Part of it is additional functions that people really don't use or don't use in most tasks. The other part is lazy programmers who take resources that they don't need to be using. There are ways to create clean, smooth, simple code that doesn't use more than it needs to. It takes a little bit of work, though.
I'm willing to give up some of my resources to additional function, but not 10 times my resources when I'm not using ten times the function. Granted, Nisus Writer is something of a hog in and of itself. One day I will find the perfect WP program.
I want a new word processor
Not necessarily this one, but a word processor. Granted, this one looks good for the price and it seems to go along with my particular...idiom. That is, it has some nice features, but it isn't bloated and boasts that it can run in 2mb. I'm downloading the demo tonight.
The different GNU Public Aqua versions of OpenOffice.Org are not particularly thrilling to me, especially since the features seem to be low and either they don't load (my machine doesn't like X11 for some reason or other) or they are deadly slow. The last one I tried did not import my itallics. Can you imagine? Oh, and Kanji/hiragana/katakana, Arabic, and Greek scripts showed as a type of courier. Οχι!
I want my word processor to be non-intensive, so that I can run it in the background and render a printable image at the same time. Right now, all of the big guys out there seem to want to make huge memory hogs that have all manner of features, but do more than I actually want to do for a given task. What does a word processor need, when you come down to it?
My ideal word process lets me set the margins, have auto numbered pages/sections, set the beginning number, be able to turn off the headers/footers on the first few pages if I want, and have the headers and/or footers alternate corners like a book. It can also print to pdf with embedded fonts. It also does endnotes/footnotes and TOC/Glossary layouts are available as templates. And you can run it in 2-4 megs of ram.
Am I asking too much? Seems to me it was possible in 1993. Why not in 2005? Why do Word Processors have to be hogs?
I wonder what...
If this were LJ, I'd add a poll. Of course, I'd have to re-up my paid account first. I'd rather wait two weeks and pay for MacJournal at this moment. Nice little program. Maybe I'll write a poll.
Alex was originally the thief Iskandarah Stavros (must remember to update the user dictionary of MacJournal!). She tries to hide that fact as best she can, but as soon as she steps into the Cairo "Underworld," it's going to be painfully obvious. My question is, does she tell Jake? Does she just let him find out? Does she wait for the right moment or, if she does, does the "right moment" come before he finds out through one thing and another? Here's the kicker: The guy has contacts who deal in information. Does he already know?
I seem to be playing out the No, no, no, yes, yes scenario, but I'm not sure about that last yes. Should I use it or not. There's this scene in Chapter 8...Even so, I don't think I'll make it to Chapter 8 before he finds out. He'd have to be a complete nitwit, which isn't something I built into his character.
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