There’s a twitter account with my name on it.
Category: Geekitude
Suggest some new comment avatars
Those of you who read or comment on my posts here on the site (instead of just LJ) know that WordPress assigns avatars to everyone who comments. The assignments are generally random, though after you make three comments you can choose one to be yours whenever you post.
The theme for the avatars is: POC in genre media. TV, movies, comics, anything visual. My list is pretty comprehensive, btu I am missing some. And every now and then people tell me so. Of course I always forget later.
So! Here’s your chance. Take a look at all of the avatars I have so far and tell me who I am missing. Can be any genre media of any time from anywhere. Just let me know character name, show, etc. also, if you have a link to a good image, stick that in. It makes things easier on me.
Yearn for the vast and endless sea…
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
(I smell a future Reader’s Choice theme)
What To Do With Smoked Salmon?
For the holidays, my homegirl Cat Rambo sent me some smoked salmon from the great Northwest. It’s been in my possession for quite a while because, I must confess, I’m not sure how best to utilize such a wonderful thing. I have the itch to cook a bigish meal this week and it would be good to include the salmon. Does anyone have any suggestions? Anything I should run out and buy to accompany it? I’m open to anything that isn’t too expensive.
One Room in NYC, Furnished With Hopes And Dreams
Due to some issues, my roommates have decided to move back to California. This is very sad because we all love each other and want to cling, but circumstances are tearing us apart! Boo. Logistics also dictate that my roommates are leaving most of their furniture behind, so I have a large, furnished bedroom just sitting there taking up space and generally not paying rent all by itself.
The boys will be gone by the beginning of April or so, and thus I’m on a roommate hunt again. Before I invite the unwashed Craigslist masses in, I wondered if anyone out there is interested in coming to stay in NYC for a few weeks or a month or whatever. It’s certainly cheaper than a hotel ($30/day) and I will even make risotto for you.
Of course, I could also use some longer-term roommates, as I plan to stay in this apt. at least until the end of the year.
Projects, Projects, Projects!
You know what I could really use? A robust To-Do List web app or software or Firefox Plugin or Thunderbird plugin or somesuch. It would really help.
So: lots of things in the works. I thought typing them here might force me to address some of them.
I recently bought ktempestbradford.com and ktbradford.com because I’ve been meaning to. I doubt anyone else was looking to snatch them up, but I wanted to get on it, anyway. KTBradford.com is already pointing to a subdomain of my site and that’s where I’m going to put stuff relating to my non-genre writing and web production/tech self. Yes, it will be a blog. I doubt I will be very prolific over there. It’s more of a self-marketing/networking thing. I still need to set up that blog, though, so I’ll get to it tonight.
I really wish had better graphic design skills so I could make the graphics I want. Does anyone know where I can get my hands on images of old-time, round typewriter keys?
KTempestBradford.com will eventually point to this blog. So ktempestbradford.com will be no more. All old links will still work, though. I think…
I’ve been needing to set up a new blog for my jewelry blog for a while, so I need to do that. The gallery site is in HTML, but I think that I may want to make it all WordPress pages. Maybe not. I’m using the Market theme for the store part, definitely, though it offers little in the way of making it look nice.
As soon as that is done, I have a plan that I alluded to the other day. I’m going to put up a poll with a short list of beads that I have and then a list of moods/emotions or themes or even a line from a story. Then I’ll beg everyone to vote on their favorite beads and their favoite mood/text/theme. I’ll use the winning combinations to make pieces of jewelry. Isn’t that fun?
One non-public project I completed recently was getting an NYC bank account (long story why I don’t have one) and creating a budget. I’ve been trying out Wasabe.com and Mint.com for keeping track of finances, spending, budgets, etc. So far I like Mint better because it has budgeting tools. I can say how much I want to spend on a category a month, then it will track how much I actually spend and alert me if I go over budget. Plus, it keeps track of the money I have in all of my accounts — bank and PayPal. Extremely useful.
I put my budget together for WisCon and discovered that I will need about $1,150 to cover airfare, hotel, food and fun spending. Eep. I am in need of roommates, by the way. I Have a Gov. Club room and having two extra bodies in there to help with cost would be absolutely divine.
I’m sure I’m forgetting other projects. Which is why I need a to-do list!
Gah! I Suuuuck :(
So, even though I put up a post about it and stuff, I didn’t get my WisCon panel descriptions in before the deadline! Between my jobs and racefail and then Comicon, the deadline completely whizzed past me. Plus, I had wanted to come up with panel descriptions for two of them and couldn’t for some reasons. Now they will not happen.
*cries*
I’m very sad.
(Even worse, the ones I really wanted in wouldn’t fit in at Readercon or anything, so I can’t even suggest them elsewhere. Foo.)
Online RPGs and Freedom
I’ve been wondering this for a while and I’m hoping some of my more gaming-inclined friends can help me out.
This weekend at Comic con the folks behind Champions online and Star Trek online were there drumming up excitement for their games. The Star Trek one looks really cool and the best part seemed to be the character creator — play an existing Trek race or create your own. Yay! I immediately thought of creating a whole race of super awesome black people and then tearing up the universe with them.
Anyway, I asked one of the people there if players were allowed to get together on one ship and ride around the world as a self-made crew and if they had to follow pre-set quests/storylines or if they could make up their own the way tabletop gamers do. She said that each player has a ship of their own, so you can get together with buddies, but you’d all have a ship. Also, there were quests you could go on or you could just explore.
As cool as I find the concept of MMORPGs, I feel like this is kind of a flaw. And maybe this is a flaw of just Star Trek Online. It seemed to me that WoW and Everquest and such was a lot like playing tabletop with the exception that you couldn’t create your own dungeons. But you could still put together a group and go off adventuring together. Everyone having their own ship is fine, but it’s not the same as putting together a crew, yanno? And she didn’t mention if you could be part of a planet and then form planetary alliances and such.
I feel like there could be so, so much depth to a game like this — creating your own race, your own planet, your own government that then interacts with the Federation or your own space-faring military and other people’s planets and races and such. That kind of freedom within an online game I could get behind. I would pay good money for it.
As I said, I am not really a gamer, though, so I have no idea how realistic this is or if other MMORPGs do this better. Anyone care to enlighten me? I’m really curious!
New Webcomic Artists?
I’ve been toying with the idea of syndicating webcomics on Fantasy for a while, but don’t know a lot about what’s out there. Anyone have suggestions for good webcomics with small profiles that might benefit from a bit more exposure? You can, of course, suggest your own.
What Media Player Do You Use and/or Suggest?
I recently had to uninstall my favorite media player: MusicMatch Jukebox. I’ve had that same install since 2004 and absolutely loved the program. But, sadly, it was getting buggier and buggier, and, of course, it was no longer supported. not because it was old, but because Yahoo bought MusicMatch and proceeded to amke ti a piece of crap as they discontinued support for pre-Yahoo versions. Yahoo ruins everything.
I used to use RealJukebox until it melded back into RealPlayer, and I haven’t seen a version that truly rocks my socks. (I’m willing to be convinced that it’s better now.) Everything else just seems to suck.
I downloaded Songbird, which is all right, but I think it’s not quite ready for prime time. It crashes easily, doesn’t dig the add-ons as much as I would like (and is thus reduced to really basic functionality), and doesn’t even play or rip CDs at the moment. How annoying is that?
I’m currently using the Creative media player that came with my MP3 player, but it isn’t as robust as I would like, either. I do like that it plays video and music.
Windows Media Player… meh. I suppose I could use it. It’s better than it used to be, that’s for sure.
iTunes is a big fat NO.
What I want is to find another program as awesome as MusicMatch JukeBox. I would prefer one that also played video. I want something with lots of functionality, that plays and rips CDs (to MP3), that organizes tracks well and will batch process them (like updating the meta data).
What do you use to organize and listen to your media? Suggest stuff to me, please. My music library will thank you.