sweasel.com

“Not that I plan to squeeze out a
blog post every day in November…”

I fully expect “to squeeze out” something that, interpretively, perhaps even euphamistically, could be referred to as a “blog post”, every day in November….

It was a dark and stormy night.

ok ball officially rolling, your turn.

Weas, the words sound good in their blurb, but writing complete and utter crap should never be considered “good”. That’s like saying we need to eat a lot of pizzas so our healthy lifestyle choices are more accentuated. It just leads to a lot of fatty crap.

Hey. I’m back. I didn’t play Far Cry for a WHOLE DAY. Wow. Hope y’all doing good.

steve: I don’t know what you’re hinting at, please clarify.

Hey, that looks like fun. I might give it a go!

The prose purpled and wilted, like the leaves of a tree in the autumnal gloaming.

The chill wind sounded like nothing so much as the resigned and disgusted sigh of a world reluctantly preparing for the approach of another midwestern winter, of the holidays, of slushy streets whose brine etched the lovingly-tended finishes off cars and evaporated into rimes of crusty…uh, crust.

dammit i can’t write this whole thing by myself, this sucks.

*throws quill pen at cat*

“her eyes glittered like a fork in a microwave…”

This will be my fourth NaNo. Last two I finished – and it wasn’t easy! – and I expect to this year. For me it’s just an excuse to write, and there’s that dreaded deadline thrown in for good measure.

Whoo-Hoo!

Scratching his crotch meditatively, McGoo belched, and considered this new challenge. “Will I have to bathe?” he wondered. “Probably not,” he mused cheerfully, industriously picking his ass whilst looking around for the remaining unopened gin bottle.

Hell, Weaz, I can crank out crap by the armload. Stand back!

I’m thinking “Return To Badgerbugger House: The Tax Assessor’s Enema.”

We could do a group NaNoWriMo, I suppose, but the idea of enduring 50,000 words of it is a little hard to bear.

I just tried to tell my boss that a proposition was “two totally different things” and ended up telling him it was “toe toodly different” things…which I realize is the sort of thing people do all the time, but I’m getting BAD about it lately. Must be stress.

I can’t voice any concept to compete successfully with an “industrious ass-picking.”

Everything is gonna be just fine, Weasel. You WILL be moved and in Jolly Ol’ come November, right around Turkey Day.

…And I would love to collaborate on a 50K-word Purple-prose Romance/Oater/Tech thriller – or sumpin.

“Toe toodly…”

Heh!

(For clarification)

“Rising, somewhat earlier than normal, but with an insistent urgency, I hurried to the water closet.

“And squeezing out my first blog post of November, I noted that all at once I felt so good, that I resolved that I should do the same each morning, for at least the ensuing month.

“Thus began a month of vapid prose, coupled with daily squeezed out, even pinched a bit at each end, writ blog posts.”

Weasel, we generated over 11,000 words here a year ago (October – 07?) in just a day or two.

But it did get tiring…

You counted!? Good lord, McGoo…I sneakingly confess, I probably read about half of it.

That’s when I was helping Uncle B move and didn’t have a connect for two weeks. So I came back to the whole thing, all-at-once-like.

Also, I have an official diagnosis of ADD. Well, the thing before ADD. But it’s official!

…And I would love to collaborate on a 50K-word Purple-prose Romance/Oater/Tech thriller – or sumpin.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

Thaddeus Groat – Elderly lord of Groat Manor. Cunning, treacherous fourth-generation grain baron.

Emily Ann Groat – Fetching young daughter of Lord Groat, heir to the vast Groat fortune.

Slab Rockfist – Young adventurer, brash, arrogant, determined to woo Emily Ann’s knickers off.

Calvin McCowlick – Shy and unassuming Groat family farmhand, utterly smitten with Emily Ann.

Hominy Gritsworth – Sworn enemy of the Groats, scion of a feud that started with generations before over the family patrons’ right to pose for the Quaker Oats cannister.

Meriweather Stoatbadger – Chronicler of the Groat family saga, secretly working for Hominy Gritsworth.

Lacy von Whalebone – Town gossip and proprietress of the Saucy Garter, purveyor of bodices suitable for ripping.

Quantity versus quality reminds me of this:
http ://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/scott.rice/blfc2008.htm

But weasels have no thumbs? How do you hold a pen or use a keyboard?

Fruitcake anyone?

silly.

Hell, Weaz! Word fo’ Windows has a word count feature.

*ahem* I saved it all (in notebook, I confess) and when I just now wanted the word count, I copied and pasted over to Word and hit the word count tool:

pages = 28
word count = 11,262
characters (no spaces) = 54,829
characters (with spaces) = 65,815
Paragraphs = 336
Lines = 1252

You left out William “Onecan” Short – handyman and sometimes village idiot.

That’s an impressive oeuvre, McGoo. And I wish you could hear the totally gay French way I pronounced oeuvre when I thought that, too.

You left out William “Onecan” Short – handyman and sometimes village idiot.

He can be the unexpectly wise character everyone dismisses and misunderestimates, until the heroine is saved by his advice in a moment of great despair.

Sort of a bumbling Mr. Miyagi but with less karate. Or maybe more.

I had in mind comic relief. But misunderestimated tertiary hero-doofus works.

Weaz – between Me, Lokki, and jwp, we really cranked it out. besides, you left a case of beer & some frozen pizzas in the fridge before you left for England. We – uh – helped ourselves.

McGoo, “onecan short” is really beautiful imagery. I learned a valuable lesson today folks. You see, even in a pile of crap there can be a bauble worth cleaning up and treasuring.

Oh stop taking me seriously, folks. Never do that.

Oh… apo…

1) go high-tech – “glittered like an AOL CD in a microwave”
2) did you get the game yet?

My thinking cap is too tight and gives me a headache ‘n a powerful case of the woozies.

I traded in my impressive Oeuvre for a Dyson. It was the cyclonic action that sucked me in.

I want you all to know that I saw a weasel today, right near Badger House. Ran right across the road in front of me, it did.

I missed the little bastard, but there’s always next time.

Novels? (shudder)

Okay, so my desktop machine is acting weirder and weirder. Especially surfing the web. And I can’t really do anything major with it until the circus moves to the next town. Adding memory helped, but did not cure.

I’ve narrowed it down to a Flash problem or a Java problem, or both. I tried uninstalling Flash, but before I reinstalled it, I tried some stuff…and Flash seems to be working after being uninstalled. WTF?

Then I went in to add/remove thinking I’d purge Java and reload. Does anybody know why Java seems to keep every 100 meg upgrade it’s ever done to itself for, like, revs and revs? I want to know if I’ll knock the whole bloody thing over if I erase a gig’s worth of Java.

Oh. Wait. Sorry.

The evening was crisp and cold. The leaves of the maple outside the window had turned…ummm…hunting season orange and were crackling and falling through the gathering dusk. Weasel tapped the TaskInfo2003 icon in her system tray and thought, “bugger. CPU maxed out again. And I’ve closed everything but Opera this time. It must be Flash. Or Java.”

She closed her eyes and breathed. A tendril of cheap vodka fumes snuck up her left nostril and tickled her frontal lobes engagingly.

“I suppose it can wait until tomorrow,” she sighed, “but I bet one of those goddamned minions has a clue what’s going on with this thing.” She got up with a creaking of knees and elbows and office chair and went into the kitchen for another.

Her third.

Stoatie, go into your internet options and make sure that the flash and jave appletts have been deleted from IE. (General – Settings – View Objects)

Weasel hunched over the screen and read the ASCII. Scubafreak. She always hesitated to shorten that. “Scuba” seemed wrong somehow, but “freak” was downright rude. SF was science fiction. Or San Francisco.

“Oh, do shut up,” she thought to herself wearily, “must you overthink EVERYthing? Just answer the man.”

I’ve got IE she typed. I tried to get rid of it once, but you sort of can’t. I seldom use it, though. Only to check things to make sure they look okay. And to clean the Spam filter. Could it somehow jam Flash into the mechanism?

Well, that was a lame way to put it. She sighed again and wondered how Scubafreak’s cat, Schroedinger, was. He must be a big strapping fellow by now. Only, she realized, no one would know until they looked.

She snorted and crunched ice.

She had promised her dentist she wouldn’t crunch ice any more. But she paid him to fix teeth, not nanny them.

“Regnad Kcin…hmmm”

The two men sat in the darkened chamber, faces lit only by the unearthly bluish glow of an ancient and discolored CRT.

“So what do you think,” asked the freezer salesman, “do I get my cut?”

The dentist handed him an envelope fat with unmarked bills, and smiled at the unsuspecting woman on the screen. “You’ve earned it.”

2) did you get the game yet?

Sadly, no. I suspect an Nv8600 just doesn’t have the chops to run something with that graphic density. The money I’d spend on the game now would be better saved and blown all at once on some really obnoxiously overpowered SLi setup in a couple of months.

THEN I can get the game. Assuming something else more pressing doesn’t come up, like, say…a car that isn’t about 150k miles past its expiration date. 🙁

“Nick Danger!” Weasel thought. Now, that was an old memory. A whole lifetime ago. A whole somebody-else’s lifetime ago. Porgy Tirebiter! Shoes for Industry!

She turned the memory over in her mind. It smelled of patchouli and pot smoke. Weasel realized she didn’t really know the difference and, despite everything, still liked the smell of both. Either. Whatever. A sneezy, peppery smell.

She couldn’t get rid of that itch between her shoulderblades. That somebody-is-watching-me feeling.

Well. A little more Val-u-Rite will put paid to that bill.

I missed the little bastard, but there’s always next time.

Eyeballs shift to the weasel hostess and evaluates her size, possible running speed, rate of reflex…under the influence and not. Focuses back on one large badger, pulls cap over eyes, and steps into the shadows.

Badgers.

Big. Mean. Slow.

Weasel likes her chances, spits on her front paws and rubs them against her thighs.

“Okay, Stripey Face,” she breathes. “Bring it!”

Actually, I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I am that we have weasels here, PnB.

Her Ladyship says that means there’s less likelihood of stoats in the vicinity, but I have my doubts. It’s a large territory and there’s room enough for both.

There is a marked shortage of badgers, however, though the local badger society (this is England, never forget 😉 ) assure me that one of my manky relatives was spotted nearby not so long ago.

I must admit, for somoene who was born in the city, I do enjoy country life 🙂

Miss Peel (who is not really a missus) sank into her computer chair (grey, swivel, about $15 from Office Depot, and horridly uncomfortable), intending to post a clever, well-written comment on sweasel.com, but hopped up again when she remembered that it was time to walk the dog. The empty dog poop bags fluttered from her jeans pocket as she pulled a sweater on and got the leash.

The dog barked wildly as the bewitchingly lovely damsel opened the back door…

(I’ll let y’all fill in what I found back there, other than dog poop. And yes, as a matter of fact, I AM bewitchingly lovely. :-P)

The observer sizes up the two mustelids, taking the measure of each with a practiced eye. A long contemplative draught on his wineglass, savoring delicate notes of oak and vanilla, perhaps a hint of pickle, and he catches the bookie’s attention with a casual wave of his hand.

“Fifty on the weasel,” said Michael Vick.

I’m imagining the effort we could bring forth if we conjoined at NaNoWriMo… If we all joined paws (wait, scratch that – counterproductive), if we all put our heads together as old hunters and peckers and invented tag team novel writing.

“Eet takes a willidge.”

I’m going to attempt NaNoWriMo this year. This is probably the best chance I’ll have for a while, since I have only one course this semester and it’s ridiculously easy (intro to digital signal processing). I’m not signed up on their website, though; I’m just going to start the novel I’ve had cooking in the back of my head and see if I can really generate 1700 words/day. (actually 1666 and 2/3 words per day, but I rounded.)

Weas, I hope you are considering making a thread for a group NaNoWriMo effort…

The sun clears the mountains and the light slowly reveals a supine figure with two horses standing over him. A boy asks his mother “what is he doing?” The mother responds “it’s called roll the fool.” Sigh…

The horses use their noses to roll him over and over while he laughs crazily. The mother says “son, he knows his horses but never learn from him, please?” Mom, why do they call him Mr Musty? Well, he smells bad on occasion, and he’s been known to be a trapper.

“Son, he knows his horses, and his horses nose him.”

Ta-dahhhhhhhhhh!!

🙂

Jill, 🙂

I so owe you on that one.

The GROSSLY out of place scuba diver looked on from a dark corner as the Badger, the Weasel, the saucy tart called M. Peel and their entourage circled each other warily. His advice about Internet Exploder had yealded unexpected complications about Adobe’s Flash player, since each browser keeps its own copy of the plugin. He considered a good, yeasty ale from the bar, wondering if anything could cut the taste of old plastic from his regulator, when the steady rythmic sound of an outboard motor with a bad muffler cut through his bemusement. He knew, deep in the pit of his soul, that a certain stripe-furred buzzsaw had returned, seeking conflict once again (or, at least, a fresh can of tuna…)

Weasel found herself awake in the wee hours. Again.

“Oh, well,” she thought, “that’s the way the priceless antique crumbles.”

And then she rolled over and hit snooze.

Yeah, I’m going to try it this year.

I, too, suck, and haven’t put electron to fiction in, oh, probably a decade-and-a-half.

Heh. What could possibly go wrong? (Oh, right, I solicited readers for ideas…)

If you haven’t read Iowahawk’s excellent tutorial in statistics, do it. Don’t get too fussed about the math; he explains in simpler terms at the end.

Oh dude.

DUDE.

Geekgasm.

hey akismet?

AKISMYASS

Sorry, apotheosis.

No worries. I just thought my post got eaten by a grue.

It’s good that you complained. I saw it on a refresh. Otherwise, I don’t always catch it until I check in the evening.

Oh, and that’s a BITCHING costume! 🙂

That’s a bitchin’ price, too.

Well, yea. There’s a weaksauce version of it for under $100 if you click the “Halo” tab at the top, but…c’mon. Go big or go home, y’know?

Since I can’t afford either right now, I’m gonna dream about the really really expensive one.

Oh, I understand – and I’d wanna buy the good ‘un if I was into it. Nothing exceeds like excess!