End of November random ponderances:
1. Wait, it’s the end of November? Where DOES the time go?
2. As I type, there is snow on the ground. Not enough to mean anything, except that we get to say there was snow in November.
3. As not really relates to the first two, you lot in Oregon should be aware that I will not be coming back for the holidays. School for one, lack of money for another. That sucks a lot, I agree, but is what it is.
4. As regards filling that time, one of my I’ll-spend-an-hour-over-food-doing-this projects was having a look at exactly how hard doing modeling and texturing for Oblivion is, for possible use in future non-Weye projects. I have come to the following realizations on the subject:
- Well, I pretty much see how to go about it, at least for architecture.
- However, holy shit guys.
- In future, I am not sure I am allowed to ever complain about the interfaces or needless complexity of other pieces of software, because Blender OMGWFTLOL. Seriously.
And speaking of Weye, some of you know there’s a long-rumored final release in waiting, which will finally tell all the stories I want to tell, fix bugs, unite the clans, free Scotland, wash your car and your dog, and do your grocery shopping as well as having more snappy dialogue and interesting locales for adventure. The good news is, there’s comparatively little left to do on it. The bad news is, it’s been that way since August, and will likely continue to be the case until December sometime when I can get around to finishing it.
A brief, utterly inappropriate to the day ponderance on reading too much post-election political bloggage.
In which the raging far left suddenly realizes that OMG Obama is keeping Gates as Secretary of Defense WTF Bush appointee OMG Iran-Contra AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!11111one!! and may, you know, not declare unilateral peace and withdraw us from the Middle East over the space of five hours in later January. This was apparently not what they thought they were electing the man for, but hey, at least they get Hillary.
Whereas your rightists get to be puzzled, because while everybody expected that OMG Hillarycare socialism massive gun control abortions Muslim terrorists aaaaaaaaaa, nobody expected that the man might actually do reasonable things as regards foreign policy, like, oh, I don’t know, keep on a guy who’s actually been fairly effective as SecDef, and say reasonable shit as regards warfighting.
Some otherwise really smart people are losing their shit all over the place over cabinet appointments, and I for one find it pretty funny, considering that I called it this way months ago, and thought it was pretty obvious if you listened to things Obama actually said, and the things he actually did.
As opposed to making pronouncements of “OMG he’s far left center-leftist center-rightist ohgodcan’tbreathcalldoctorshelpaaaaaaaaa”, when it was obvious all along he was going to do what he was going to do and didn’t care about your labels. Change, and all that. Surprise! or something.
We shall see as to how this all translates to effective governance, and as it translates to other important shit like Fixing Our Broken Economy, Which Is In Bad Shape, but I for one like what I see.
Anyway. Go eat large flightless birds and enjoy Thanksgiving.
In which dinner and a practically debilitating headache compel me to finish my reviewing of the the last four Wheel of Time novels and the prequel, New Spring, finishing the series begin here and continued here.
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, but spoiler warnings remain.
THERE ARE ENORMOUS WORLD-ENDING SPOILERS HERE.
The Path of Daggers
This book begins the “new” books for me, as contrasted to the “old” books which are 1-7. I think a lot of the old guard fandom, being the folks I read on rasfwrj back at the time, think this way too, although depending on who you talk to, Book 7 counts here as well.
In any event, there’s a reason for this. On one level, there’s a lot of subtle changes to the writing style in here – we start getting longer passages with individual characters, scenes draw out, we get a lot of new (and oft-annoying) characters introduced, and the whole tone of the series changes. This was also the real start of the 2+ year waiting period between each book, giving people time to forget things, and to complain about plot points not getting resolved in what they felt was a reasonable time. There were plenty of complaints about the whole series going rapidly downhill, although a few supporters were heard to say that no, we just had to wait and treat the whole lot like a single book and read them straight through.
I’m here to tell you, these people are fairly correct. I used to be in the detractor camp, mind you, strongly enough that if you asked me stuff that happened in Crossroads of Twilight, I simply wouldn’t be able to tell you – I didn’t care enough to check. You can be damn sure I remember every bit of Dumai’s Wells in Book 6 though.
So it goes. For all the complaining done at the time, I was surprised at how much I liked TPOD, all things considered. While the Elayne plot is clearly the weakest thing here, it has yet to descend to the depths of its annoyingness. The same with Perrin, although I was surprised at how much I actually liked Perrin’s plotline once I knew it was actually going to end some day, and wasn’t spending 2 year waits being disappointed. Too, while I was disappointed in Mat’s absence, I forgot how much Rand ends up doing. Almost assassinated? Check. Fights enormous war with Seanchan I somehow totally forgot about? Check. In fact, this is the beginning of sort of a trend – these books are usually at their best when they explore some culture in depth, and in that, the Seanchan wind up being the new Aiel, as Our Heroes interact with them a lot in the next four books.
Winter’s Heart
What went wrong in this book? Well, Elayne’s going to continue to have dumb shit going on, and while I kind of like the Kin, even as annoying as they are (which they even have a reason for), the Sea Folk, somebody just needs to balefire. They’re annoying, they’re bitchy, they don’t particularly add anything. I’d complain about Perrin here, but I realized I like his plot, so, uh. Also I guess I think Cadsuane is dumb.
What went right? Everything else. Far Madding is interesting. Hunting renegades is interesting. Every small thing Egwene ever does is interesting. We finally, after all these books, cleanse saidin, and it’s cool. I appreciate the moment of extreme irony when the Compelled Darkfriend Aes Sedai leaps out and kills one of the Forsaken. Mat continues to get cooler, if this is possible.
Crossroads of Twilight
I was pretty unsympathetic towards this book when it first came out, because holy shit, nothing happens, but when you read it as sort of an enlongated epilogue to WH and prologue to Knife of Dreams, it suddenly gets a lot better. Knowing that a lot of the plot lines are going to end in the next book leaves you not waiting in disappointment during this one, and that’s a plus. Again, Perrin’s plot is way better, Mat rocks, I’d watch the Aes Sedai do pretty much any damn thing at this point because it’s cool, and as I say, the Seanchan are awesome in all ways of interestingness.
That having been said, Elayne’s entire arc may be more interesting than it used to be, and it was actually kind of fun for stretches, but what we really needed was more Rand. Rand is by now utterly fascinating to me, in ways that would take forever to explain, but let us just say he’s on my great characters list for a reason.
Knife of Dreams
Which I originally talked about here back in 2005 for the curious.
As I keep saying, I got a lot more out of the Perrin/Faile arc this time around. Which is not to say that I love it in the same fashion I love the Two Rivers arc in Shadow Rising, because the only arcs to compete with that are also in Shadow Rising, but it was good. I was actually pretty sad/pissed about Rolan getting killed. That having been said, Aram could have used a better conclusion than that.
Again, the best I can say about Elayne’s entire arc is that now it’s done with, and as an added bonus, the Sea Folk appear to fucked off, which is what they needed to do 4 books ago. Considering how great I thought they were in Shadow Rising, their subsequent downfall was really sad.
I am hard pressed to think of ways in which Mat’s stuff wasn’t completely awesome, all day long and well into the night. The same goes for Egwene’s White Tower stuff.
Unlike pretty much everybody at the time, I find that I like the Rand/Semirhage fight the more I read it. Brief, Semirhage gets owned, Rand loses hand, Rand shrugs, people see Rand and go “Holy shit, dude.” This book and ones immediately prior say a whole lot about him, and as I say, I find it fascinating.
I think it’s pretty obvious by the writing of said fight, btw, that Semirhage will totally come back and do some stuff in Book 12. We’re not done with her at all.
On the Seanchan note, I am intensely satisfied at how owned Suroth got. Yes, that’s pretty cold. However.
Let us just make the note here that considering how many plotlines remain to have conclusion, Book 12 is going to be some kind of insanity, wherein the plots for each chapter must by necessity be the sorts of things that would be the keystones of whole other books or series. If done well, this is going to be epic as hell, and I find that I’m pretty excited for this time next year.
New Spring
In brief, while I don’t care much for Siuan is a character, Moiraine and Lan are awesome, and everything about them is awesome. And, as I mentioned before, about half the book is nothing but internal White Tower politics, history, and the like, which I’m exceptionally fond of.
And do you know why I’m exceptionally fond of the White Tower stuff? I mean, yes, the stuff about how you train people to wield magic is interesting. The politics is convoluted and fun to follow, all the time. Even when Elaida’s being an idiot.
But the really fun part about White Tower scenes is when you start talking to Aes Sedai, you’re pretty much assured of getting a fair number of “Oshi-” moments as you learn all about the 3,000 year myth the Tower has built around itself, and then you learn just how much of that myth is a pack of complete lies.
For instance:
- “But there are no Black Ajah!” Surprise!
- “The Three Oaths are involate!” Surprise! (also the origin of the Oath Rod as a criminal justice instrument is awesome)
- “But lost Talents are lost!” Surprise!
- “But the Tower has always been inviolate and whole!” Uh, surprise for you, sisters. This is actually my favorite one, because it ties so many myths together, and irrevocably, forcibly, and powerfully shatters all of them, and New Spring does this really well. The whole thing gets talked over in detail in the WOTFAQ, but I never cease to have a whole series of “Oh, holy SHIT NO WAY!” moments as we figure out that not only is there a Black Ajah, they murdered at least one Amyrlin, manipulated the Red into doing for another, further manipulated the Red into launching a multi-year search and destroy campaign, and continued running rampant until Ishamael, who incidentally was supposed to have been imprisoned for the last 3,000 years, smacks them the hell down. Oh, and essentially nobody knows about any of this. Madness.
Again, the reveal on how much Ishamael was really running world politics for the last three millenia was and remains for me probably the biggest shock for me in anything I’ve ever read.
Quality entertainment, the lot of it. As an exercise, a full series reread was totally worth it, and I feel like I understand it all now. All kinds of little annoyances and niggling plot points have fallen into place, and I am now ready and excited for A Memory of Light. As in days of yore, I remain glad to have read this series, and fully and wholeheartedly recommend it to those of you who have not, if indeed any of you have read this far, in which case I encourage you to forget everything you just read, THEN read the series.
In which, fueled by a poorly timed influx of instant cider, I perform various blog maintenance and updates. In bed. In the true tradition of pajamas blogging.
I do these things for your benefit, O Readers.
Mostly.
Various things of note:
1. Entries on the main page have increased from 3 to 5, because they were shooting by pretty fast, especially if I posted 2 or so things on a given day. This should strike a decent balance between speed reading and endless text walls.
2. Offset the archives link on the main page so it can be found easier. I never can find the thing.
3. Both category and date archives on the archives page now have a count of how many entries are in any specific category/month. April 2003 is the busiest month on record, with 25 posts, for the record. The category ones display wrong. I don’t know why.
4. Both date and category archive pages now have forward/next/top navigation tools. Again, the category navigation works incorrectly for some unknown reason. I must look into this anon.
5. I have updated the Google Analytics code I’m using for visitor tracking. It now tracks all pages except the “Things To Do” pages. This is primarily for my own curiosity in determining who uses the site and how. Previous versions only tracked main page hits, which was useful except insofar as I have a fairly deep archive that people search, and I’d like to know about it.
6. I’m pretty sure I fixed the annoying bug where the comment popup never actually popped up when replying on the main page. Let me know if this is not the case.
There remain a good several projects waiting for further bouts of insomnia:
1. Import remaining comments from entries that lost them during the Great Server Crash of 2007. This is relatively simple – I just need to take an hour or so and do it. Thanks to Sarah, most of this content still survives.
2. Fix category navigation, either by re-adding categories to all entries, adding tags, or some combination of both. I’m not sure if anybody besides me would find this to be of use. Either way, I have over 750 entries, making this a major project unlikely to be accomplished soon.
3. Fix the comment boxes to actually resemble the rest of the site for once in their lives. This is easier said than done, as said boxes are a code nightmare.
4. Fix the search results page to actually resemble the rest of the site. However, holy shit.
5. Redo the bottom of entry data so that permalinks have a “link to this entry” text rather than using the date, which is non-intuitive. Easy project, once I figure out exactly how.
6. Fix various and assorted links in the sidebar which are either dead or need revamping.
7. Fix all the old links and image links to not include the http://dwip.alsherok.net section, in preperation for future domain changes.
8. Do something one way or the other about the pages in the Things To Do section of the site. I am uncertain if any of these are actually visited at all anymore, and many of them haven’t been updated since approximately the fall of the Roman Empire. I suspect that it’s about time that many of them either retire or get folded into blog posts, which is a proper place for most of them. I welcome input and suggestions on the topic.
9. On that note, I need to fix my Europe pictures page so that it’s not some obscure page linked from one post, and make it so that the pictures are included in the main post body.
10. A thought that occurs to me, most photoblogging posts could use a fold in the middle to cut down on page loading time for all those images.
11. Do something one way or the other about the styles. Either they need to get some work put into them, or they need to go the way of the dodo. I suspect the latter. The x-ray rabbit was never meant to be supplanted.
12. A possible search revamp to use Google’s functionality. This would allow a number of useful things, including increased Google Analytics data for me, and getting rid of that shithouse MT perl search that makes me want to die. This bears some thought.
Anyone what has ideas or suggestions or comments, do feel free to use the spiffy fixed comment box.
In which, brought about by this and pretty much all related bloggage and photos thereof, via Mike Hoye, a man who does not know me, but who I have been reading since back in the day on rasfwrj because I find him amusing and interesting and who indirectly provides me with things such as what I linked above, and you’ll forgive the run-on sentences because it’s 3 in the morning and I’m tired but I want to talk about some shit, so there.
Also brought to you by Neil Young, who I have been listening to approximately all day and who fits the mood.
Anyway. So that first post and other collected photos and musings have me doing thinking of my own. Read enough Sweet Juniper archives, which I have now done, and you’ll get a sense of Detroit as alternately a place of intense decay, a dangerous place, a place of sometime frustration, but also a place of a strange sort of beauty, a place that can be reveled in if you take it for what it is.
And I suppose that describes my feelings towards New Haven these days. I am, as time goes on, less and less of a transplanted Oregonian, more of an actual Connecticut resident. This is something my girlfriend likes to remark upon when driving – I run yellow-into-red lights with abandon, I frequently remark and berate my fellow citizens upon their acts of New Haven dumb stupidity – I am becoming, in part, that which I once decried.
This shows in other ways, too. I am relatively at ease now traversing Newhallville, casually remarking on the cleanup of drug corners. We had a shooting in my neighborhood a month or so gone, shots fired pretty well right outside my front door. Cops showed up across the street the other night, six or seven cars worth, for what reason I do not know. If these are still events of at least minimal concern, they are still of less import than I would have thought prior to moving here – living here, you learn to take a certain level of property damage and criminal/police presence as a sort of background noise in a way you don’t, elsewhere.
There’s a beauty to this place, too, one that took me a time to find, but manifests itself in red and gold leaves, in a grey sky over grey houses and the naked grey branches of those recently clothed trees, in brilliant sunsets, in the early morning light on a city seen from a ninth floor downtown, in banks in old houses, and in a school with a little pond at the foot of a tree-covered rocky ridge, or another school of majestic old buildings in the heart of a modern city.
There will always be, I suppose, a gulf now in my life between what has come before this place and what will come after. Living in Oregon was a sedate experience, pleasant generally, never at all dangerous, always beautiful and green unless it was raining and even then, a civilized place for civilized people. There’s more to say on that, but that will do for the moment. Suffice it to say that I grew up there, and having done so must always view it through the prism of having done it.
There is an intensity here that Oregon has rarely had for me. Part of that comes from the life I lead here – having passed fully into adulthood, with a relationship, and a job, graduate school. These two years have seen some of my greatest triumphs and worst defeats, and living here I must always be reminded of them.
But I find also that without realizing it I am now part of a community in a way I have not been before. I have a stake of sorts in a house, neighbors who I see come and go and exchange conversation on the street. I find that I care about the state of the plans to demolish the Oak Street Connector and revitalize the central city, or the new police chief. Indeed, I’ve had more interactions with the police, all reasonably positive, in 2 years here than in 25 in Oregon. I’ve voted here, I’ve had jury duty here. I care that these roads all suck, and I know the annoyance of being snowed in.
The short of it being that I’m having a whole lot less “holy shit I’m in Connecticut!” moments than in days of yore, which I suppose means I consider it home. Or something.
I think I’ll go to bed now. If I wake up tomorrow and this makes no sense, remember to blame the shitty power here. I’m not sure why, but I’m sure it must be at fault. It’s the cause of all my other problems, after all.
“…it may be that a devoted band of Cavalry…I can force my way across the Mississippi. and if nothing can be done there…then I can go to Mexico and have the world from which to choose a location. Dear Wife this is not the fate to which I invited when the future was rose-colored to us both; but I know you will bear it even better than myself and that of us two I alone will ever look back reproachfully on my past career.”
—Jefferson Davis, April 23, 1865
In which, to complete the two concerts needed to see my two favorite bands, Sarah took me last night to go see the Smashing Pumpkins at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville on their 20th anniversary tour.
…you, there in the back, with the Last of the Mohicans jokes. Go ahead. We thought them too.
As I say, this is the second of two concerts needed to see my favorite bands. The first, for U2, took place in 2005, and was notable among other things for being the first time we’d met in person. And now here we are.
A word about the Mohegan Sun, which is a Really Large Casino, and that word is “Oi.” Not so much the driving on I-95 or I-395 parts, as they were sedate. More the getting lost in the maze of parking garages before finding the one with the shuttle, and going with that. I was pleased to have finally found a place to park for free in CT, though as Sarah noted, it’s not like they aren’t trying to take my money in other ways.
The less we say about trying to find food in the local area, the better, although that parking lot in the pizza place that was randomly closed was…I don’t think small even begins to cover it. In either case, we found a food court in the casino, which provided me with the World’s Saltiest $3 Pretzel, Now With Extra Salt.
It also provided us with some Chinese TV, the content of which I am unsure how to describe to you, because, for serious guys, WTF? But so far as I can tell, it was some sort of General Hospital meets the D&D Movie thing, featuring:
- A Very Angry Chinese Woman In A White Dress, Who May Be Evil;
- The Chinese Rahm Emanuel, who pretty much stands there a lot;
- Some Chinese Guy In A Business Suit, who spouted some dialogue I didn’t understand and attacked some dying guy in a hospital bed with scissors;
- The Token Half-White Guy, who looks like he fronted for the Chinese Goo Goo Dolls when he’s not…actually I have no idea what he was doing;
- Forest Shaman Guy, who is fascinating to me not just because he randomly shows up in a forest, conjures CGI fire, then conjures some CGI spirits or something, then conjures some CGI purple thing that chases this dude’s SUV, and also turns Business Suit Guy into a demon or something, but also because he wears this crazy turban and vest getup and looks like some random sailor from a Sinbad movie, and none of the otherwise ostensibly modern people are like “Dude, WTF are you wearing?” or the Chinese equivilent.
Anyway, so we went to this concert. No opening act, began pretty promptly at 7:30, much to the confusion of several hundred people who didn’t show up until later, the losers (we got there at 6:45), and ended about 3 hours later.
The crowd was wierd. Fair number of people my age, to be sure, and some people who must be either new fans, or got MCIS handed to them in the cradle, as well as some genuine actual old people, which struck me as a bit odd. Not a previous concert or other SP shirt to be seen, which struck me as very strange.
As a frequent listener to shows from across the Pumpkins’ career, I feel like I’ve been inducted into something, insofar as the shit the crowd yells hasn’t changed at all over the years. The “I LOVE YOU BILLLYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!” screams remain…precisely the same, so as I could hear one from 1995 and the ones last night, and not be able to tell which was which.
Also a guy who yelled “Freebird!” at random, and got a lot of laughs.
Whereas in days of yore at the U2 concert, we had Fist Pumping Guy, who spent the whole show doing just that, I think the star of this show is Hopping Girl, who spent a good chunk of the show hopping up and down and clapping her hands and I think squeeing in delight.
And there was much to squee about, so let’s actually talk about it:
A couple notes – the SP sound was generally louder than the relatively tiny Mohegan Sun Arena could take. Which was fine on the one hand, as being vibrated by guitars is kind of cool, and not so fine on the other, because about half the time I had no idea WTF I was listening to. Also, at various points there was amp, mic, or both trouble, which meant whatever Billy was singing, nobody could hear him.
As to the songs:
They led off with I Am One Part 2, which was cool, although it sounded nothing at all like the version I know, which I guess was sort of a harbinger of the future. Billy’s mic may as well not have been on for the whole thing, which meant I was like “is this what I think it is? Maybe? Er?” the whole time.
By contrast, everybody knows Soma, which was awesome, done as in days of yore, done perfectly. Big cheers here – another foreshadowing, as I think most of the people there were like me, SD and MCIS fans my age lately come back.
The setlist and Sarah tell me they played Tarantula followed by the new song G.L.O.W., which I’ll take their word for. I only recognized that it was new stuff, shrugged, realized that a good chunk of any SP show is going to having your senses exploded while you are confused as to what you are hearing, and enjoyed. As with all the Zeitgeist era stuff, these were probably at least 15 minutes worth of show.
I of the Mourning was good as always, although as Sarah noted to me, the album version remaind superior, but Mayonaise about caused a riot of deleriously happy fans, and Tonight Tonight was worth price of admission. “You may not remember this song,” Billy says to us, “the 90s were kind of a rough time.” Somewhere in here, I stopped saying “Yay, I’m finally at an SP show!” and was in some sense hauled back to my adolescence when I heard Tonight Tonight on the radio and it changed my life.
A Song for a Son is new. I think I like it, although I’d like to hear a studio version of it to really hear what he’s singing. I THINK it was a little repetetive, but again, I liked it – sort of a droning, timeless quality about it, I think.
Continuing with new stuff, they did Superchrist followed by United States. This is what the setlist tells me – I couldn’t detect an actual break between the two, and again, it was like 15 minutes worth of song, so who the hell knows. What I will say is that while I’m not sure I want to do this again anytime soon, the intro part of this, where Billy was essentially making machine gun sounds with his guitar while the wall of lights behind the band flickered at some manic intensity, was an awesome spectacle of rock music, one of those things that cannot be replicated except with a stage and a few thousand people and a ton of amps and lights. Worth admission right there.
After blowing our ears out, they went accoustic for a time. I’m not sure I could seperate 99 Floors and Owata, and I think they were fine, but I need more listening and cleaner versions to really tell. I have no such problems with Landslide, which was as always amazing. To then have it go into one of the best versions of Disarm I’ve ever heard, complete with violin intro, well. There are reasons one is a fan of a band for well over a decade, let us say, and reasons why I must now forever love my girlfriend for providing me with moments such as this.
Oh, then, following what the setlist tells me was Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (which was cool but didn’t sound like MCIS to me), they went electric again, with Today, Cherub Rock, Zero, and Bodies all in a row.
Yes, SP fans, all in a row we got accoustic Landslide, Disarm, and MCIS, followed by Today, Cherub Rock, Zero, and Bodies. I see no possible way in which I can argue with that. That I should have also liked to have heard BWBW and 1979 is merely an observation rather than a suggestion of any sort of displeasure.
That having been said, following that set, the show rapidly descended into WTF Pumpkins Jam territory:
- Gossamer? Ok. Very long and jammish.
- SP covers Sounds of Silence, throws in Little Red Riding Hood snippets? Well, the music they actually played was awesome, but it wasn’t Sounds of Silence, and for the snippet part Billy was just making shit up rather than actually singing. Not that this was bad, mind you, but an observation.
- The ultra-long, super-jam version of Heavy Metal Machine? Pretty good, except that it bore no actual resemblance to that song. They said it was, Billy sang the words, but otherwise no relation. However, there was an awesome transition into Glass’ Theme to end the main set that was amazing, and an awesome, if almost painful, ended. Sarah actually balled up with her hands over her ears for that bit. Me, I liked it.
That having been said, I wish I could summon any sort of enthusiasm for the encore, which I described to Sarah (who fled in terror at this point), as Billy channeling his inner Pink Floyd, only to later discover that it was, in fact, a cover of Pink Floyd’s Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun – 15 minutes or so worth of bizzare, spacey, all over the map, dude-I’m-on-an-acid-trip-whoa jam rock. Mind you that I am not opposed to this, normally, and it being a Pumpkins show you know you’re in for something like it at some point. However, after all that long ass Zeitgeist stuff? Too much. Way too much.
In the event, to recap this and the U2 concert:
- U2 fan for 8 years at time of concert, mised multiple opportunies for a concert previously, now have done this and have t-shirt.
- SP fan for 13 years at time of concert, missed multiple opportunies for a concert previously, now have done this and have t-shirt.
- Responsible for this is one girl who seems to make it her business that I should hear good music and collect t-shirts, not to mention fulfill my life goals in regards to these two things, which I can heartily endorse. I believe I shall be keeping her about for a time.
[This will be long. However, there will be random animal imagery and computer shenanigans, for your amusement if not mine]
The title having little to do with reality, except insofar as I have decided that this imagery now needs to be a comic book, and the following comments I made to Whir:
[11:34] Dwip: I’m fairly sure my next move will be to go out in the forest, capture a number of wild and hungry bears, and unleash them at the Acronis offices.
[11:35] Dwip: Having done that, I will capture entire prides of lions to unleash at Microsoft for giving me a gimp version of Vista.
But I get ahead of myself.
In the beginning, circa 2002, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I built a new system for the express purpose of playing Morrowind, I got a brand new 60 gig Maxtor HD. And I made it my secondary games drive. And I looked upon it, and it was good.
Fast forward to 2006. Dinosaurs met their fate at the hands of a speeding meteor, and I rebuilt my system again for the express purpose of playing Oblivion. You may notice a trend here. The Maxtor became my Windows drive, with a brand new Western Digital 250 gig HD as my games/music drive. And I looked upon it, and it was good.
Fast forward to about a week ago. Having just picked up a new Seagate 1 TB external HD and Acronis True Image 11 for backup purposes, I decide to run Scandisk, because for the first time in months, I can actually do this AND run defrag, which I also do. And here I learn that my trusty Maxtor, faithful old servant of many a day, is now dying of cancer, rapidly. Bad sectors all over the place.
Cue a conversation with Dad:
Me: Well, my hard drive is about to fail. This is bad. I am as we speak buying a 160 gig drive to replace it for way way cheap.
Dad: Well, if you want I can send you this 320 gig HD I have just sitting around.
Me: Who the hell just has a 320 gig HD sitting around?
Dad: It was going to be my backup drive until I got that 1 TB Seagate external instead.
Me: *reflecting on the massive explosion in hard drive sizes in the modern era*
Now, all of that business aside, I shall present you with some helpful hints, should you ever find yourself in a similar situation to me, replacing your Windows drive with a larger drive and restoring a backup.
1. Acronis incremental backups are an evolutionary dead end, much akin in utility to, say, growing spines on your feet that stab you while you walk. Barbed spines. With poison. That make you kill yourself. Because trying to restore from one will take forever and ultimately fail. And having spent 5 hours on the project, you will be VERY ANGRY.
2. If you feel the need to format your new large hard drive, thinking that perhaps your issue with the previous restoration wasn’t that it was an incremental backup, but that you maybe didn’t format the drive first, please do not use your pre-Service Pack 1 Windows XP CD to do the format, because you may not remember, but pre-SP 1 XP has no idea that hard drives above 137.4 gigs even exist, and you will spend hours trying to figure out what the hell the issue is. I speak from some slight experience here.
3. If you, learning of this issue, decide to use your Windows Vista CD to attempt to format the new drive, you should be aware that at least some upgrade versions of Vista, such as the 32-bit version of Ultimate available as part of the Ultimate Steal program, require you to install Vista from an already-existing copy of Windows, instead of, you know, checking for a goddamn install CD like every previous version of Windows, such as my upgrade version of XP, which is incidentally why Dad also sent me a CD for Windows 98. If you have no existing install of Windows, like for instance if your hard drive is brand new, this may be an issue. This further does not bode well for the new system build I bought Vista for in the first place.
4. At this point, you may find out by reading the tragically light Acronis instructions that Acronis will format the drive for you. I urge you, at this point, to not put your fist through your monitor. Monitors are expensive.
5. However, assuming your new hard drive is larger than your old hard drive, and you don’t want to spend 3 hours restoring your backup only to find that you have a 60 gig partition on a 320 gig drive with a lot of space you can’t use, you need to ignore the seemingly logical steps, and also the useless Acronis helpfiles, and do something else:
6a. When Acronis shows up and asks which disk you want to recover, you have to select the partition, but not the master boot record. They tell you this not at all. Thanks, internets.
6b. Then you get to choose how much disk space you want your partition to be.
6c. It asks you if you want to restore another partition or HD. You do. Now you select the MBR.
6d. Then you hit Proceed, and wait for a few hours for the thing to complete.
…49 minutes left on this fucker. It had better work.
I feel somehow as if the bears thing might have been easier.
[UPDATE 2:24]
In the event that after multiple hours of recovery, Acronis should suddenly not recognize the existance of your external HD, well. You poor bastard.
[UPDATE 7:40]
Well, that worked like advertised, save for the 4 previous fuckups that took all of two goddamn days to deal with. I could have gotten out and pushed faster than that took.
Now I get to restore large chunks of my E drive, all about 120 gigs of it, because of XP’s scandisk being a cock when I did the original drive insertion. I formatted it, rebooted, missed the XP install disc wanting me to hit any key within X seconds or it would do whatever it was doing, which turned out to involve scandisk thinking my entire E drive was full of corrupt files and obliterating them. This is somewhat far from what I actually wanted to have happen, which was repair my C drive, in much the same way that whales are somewhat far from being poodles, which is to say not at all.
However, the Windows version of Acronis True Image, which is for some bizzare reason much faster than the boot version, informs me that if I wait an hour, this will cease to be an issue. Also on that speed note, it’s amazing what kind of speed you pick up when you’re using a not corrupted ATA-133 drive versus a corrupt ATA-100 drive.
To borrow a phrase, in conclusion: Jesus.
[UPDATE 9:15]
E drive done. I probably shouldn’t have downloaded Pure Pazaak to keep me occupied while I waited, because holy shit is that game addictive for no reason.
In continuation of this entry, wherein I reread Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series and ponder upon them for a time.
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, but spoiler warnings remain.
THERE ARE ENORMOUS WORLD-ENDING SPOILERS HERE.
The Fires of Heaven
I always sort of forget about this book, which isn’t new – I did it back in the day, too. Its problem is being stuck between the best book in the series – The Shadow Rising, and the second best book in the series, Lord of Chaos. That it also ranks among the best is slim consolation.
And make no mistake, it’s good. I forgot how much great stuff happens – Rand beats down Couladin, Mat comes into his own, Rahvin gets his just deserts, Valan Luca…the list goes on. I forgot how much I like all of the stuff that goes on here, although I almost begin to see the point of annoyance at Elayne and Nynaeve. Fortunately for them, knowing that they’re supposed to be a bit annoying, and that they get better later in the series, makes them better.
Also, starting really with this book, we start revisiting some of the older locations from earlier books, and people we haven’t seen for a time. Remember Cairhein from The Great Hunt? Yeah, it’s ON FIRE, and that nice rigid social structure half obliterated. Remember Caemlyn and it’s crowd from The Eye of the World? Jacked by one of the Forsaken, and if you remember that scene where Rand practically shits himself talking to Morgase, well, she’s not so high and mighty now. Ditto the Aes Sedai, and that’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Lord of Chaos
I think Dumai’s Wells sort of overshadows this whole book in reterospect, but there’s plenty what goes on, starting with Salidar, and in general some of the relearning of what was lost. One of the things that Jordan did really well was to really instill in the reader the sense, the feeling of the Age of Legends, and why it was called that, and the utter awe in which people in the Third Age held it. And so to see stuff like the Black Tower, or Traveling, is really amazing stuff. Which I think is why it’s such a big deal at Dumai’s Wells, when you see the Asha’man show up in a giant “Oh SNAP!” moment.
Too, that whole business where the Dragon breaks bonds and all that. You get a really dramatic view of that at Dumai’s Wells, of course, but there’s all sorts of little things that go on.
Also, on the subject of Mazrim Taim, if you start looking, and this comes up pretty much in every book from now on, it’s crazy how Jordan plants all these little clues and foreshadowing moments, where random shit people talked about three books ago is suddenly important. Like, say, Mazrim Taim escaping clear back in like The Dragon Reborn.
Also for this book, absences. I’m never a really huge Moiraine fan, until all of a sudden she’s not there any more, and I realize I miss her. The Aiel, OTOH, I think are awesome, and this is really their last big book, and that saddens me, because they and the Aes Sedai are the two most interesting cultures in Randland.
Before I leave off LOC, I’d like to note that Dumai’s Wells, since I’ve read it, has pretty well defined epic for me, and along with the history of the Aiel, is my favorite scene in the books. To be sure, there’s some lofty stuff in there about the world being changed forever, and yes, you might say, what else is new, and really, what ELSE has Rand been doing with his time besides changing the damn world all over town, but, ok. We have:
- The Aes Sedai, who have been running the world for the last six books, very abruptly get taught otherwise. The most haughty, arrogant and justly so group in the world just got made to swear allegience to a guy and a group of guys it spent the last few thousand years hunting down. A Big Deal.
- A whole new way of waging a war that hasn’t been seen for multiple thousands of years shows up, dramatically, and blows up everybody. Changes the whole power dynamic.
- We’ve been building up to some sort of conflict with the Shaido, and with the Aes Sedai, for like three books now, and with the Red Ajah in particular since Book 2. It is worthy.
A Crown of Swords
This is the last of what I consider to be the “original” books, such as they are, both because this is roughly about the time I had to actually start waiting in between books for two years at a time, which means books past this point I didn’t internalize nearly so much, and because a lot of the feel is going to change pretty quick.
Some interesting memories with this one. This is the first book we got new after I started reading, which started a tradition of Dad going out on the release day of the new WOT book, and me stealing it from him because I read them faster. ACOS, all 295,000 words of it, I read in one night. I blame a lot of that on being a book with a lot of Mat in it, which means it’s hilarious.
OTOH, Perrin drags. I don’t quite understand that, because his plots are all interesting, but man, that wagon ride home after Dumai’s Wells is a slog. Hopefully his later trek through Ghealdan isn’t as bad as I remember.
There were things I didn’t really get previously, that I sort of suddenly understood this time about. The weather, chief among them. I hadn’t really understood how wonky the weather was previously – which is a big deal – because I didn’t understand the calender. It was summer in JANUARY. Oh. That suddenly makes the Bowl of the Winds plotline a whole lot more of a huge deal.
Elayne’s big moment where she tells off the collected Aes Sedai was a lot awesomer this time around. She’s still a bitch, but she stands up and takes charge and it’s awesome.
Similarly, Nynaeve’s block going away is sort of a deus ex machina in many ways, insofar as Moghedein just sort of shows up at random, but it’s still really neat. Again, while Lan was always cool, Nynaeve’s really gotten a lot better as a character for me. Maybe because I’m just older now, I don’t know. Either way.
The Sea Folk can pretty much die in a fire. They were cool, the first time they showed up in TSR, but then every single one of them apparently took pills to make them raging assholes. It’s tragic.
Also, Sammael. The way he owned the Shaido was fantastic. And finally we get the payoff of four entire books worth of buildup to go fight him, and it proves itself to be worthy.
Via the NYTimes.
There’s a lot of things I could say about tonight, and perhaps I shall say them anon. For the moment, let me say this – I got brought up on a lot of ideas of what this country was about, and what it could be, who we could be. And here we have elected a man who makes me feel, makes a great many of us feel, that we can be that place.
This is a pretty amazing moment in history, and I’m profoundly grateful that I’ve been here to seen it.