Fun

Tonight was Denis' Halloween-themed game night, where those who wish may dress as something from a game of some sort. So out of it I have been, I had nothing to offer this year, and was lamely preparing to make jokes about being a null koan, but nobody asked me about it, so it was all good.

The Four Freaks were my favorite, costumed as an entire game of Sorry!, complete with red/blue/green/yellow outfits, and cards which let them swap places at any time. (This was how I managed to beat Caius and jadelennox at Lost Cities, at the same time, ho ho ho.) Jennie was Galadriel wearing the One Ring, and whenever anyone would find this sub-obvious she would stand up and go A QUEEEEEN! and the person would say oh, okay.

cthulhia was Devil (Girl) Bunny, though it did not incorporate her devil outfit from last weekend's party. And I missed queue promoting magid through a Gnostical progression from the two of (tiny plastic) swords, to the Queen of (5.25" floppy) Disks, to the Fool. But that's fine; she looks good in motley.

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It's time to drag out a thicker blankie. Been waking up a lot from the cold.

Had a full-on Lovecraftian nightmare last night. In the dream, I read a post by a Usenet nutcase who wrote that a spaceship in orbit around Earth would, at 5 a.m. the next morning, merge with Jesus Christ, speak in his voice, and then explode. The explosion would be two-dimensional and also the size of the entire solar system, wiping out everything. (The two-dimensional aspect was no doubt inspired by a plot point from that afternoon's Star Trek.)

The scary thing was the revelation that this explosion was just the equivalent of a single neuron firing within a cosmic-sized intelligence, or, more accurately, a single syllable being spoken in a unfathomably long and slow conversation being had between megagalactic entities, to whom the fate of us Earthlings was no more important than the health of the microbes on my keyboard is to me. In my dream, upon reading this, I started screaming, and then I woke up, silently, but very unnerved... and I checked the clock. It was only 2:30 a.m. I would wake up about once an hour until 5:30, at which point I slept until 8:00.

Yes, I know it's a tired trope, older than H. G. Wells, and it didn't really make me actively frightened, but it's the closest thing I've had to a nightmare in I dunno how long.

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I wonder if Apple has a publication on how Mail.app's Spam filter works. (The application calls it a Junk filter, I suppose to dodge the whole issue of Hormel's feelings.) Failing that, I wonder if there's a way I can find out through clever reverse engineering. I bet that there is. Oh, IiiIIIiiIIIii have some ideas, I do.

I bet that it ranks spammish email attributes differently than SpamAssassin does. That program, written by and for plaintext-snob Unix geeks (like me), gives big penalties for HTML mail, while Mail.app revels in it; it not only renders all incoming HTML mail by default, but it also downloads and displays all its image tags. (You can turn off image-grabbing, but if there's a way to make it stop rendering HTML, I have not found it. Which is a shame.)

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I started to read Amercian Gods over the weekend. It's... okay. I guess I'm underwhelmed at the theme, one explored by plenty of other SF authors and screenwriters before -- including Gaiman himself, through one of The Sandman's minor characters. (Poor old Bast.) That said, I appreciate the fact that we're over the hump as far as getting all the supernatural setup out of the way before the page numbers hit triple digits. It's a refreshing change from the languid pace of The Liveship Traders.

The main character comes across as a cipher, and so I can't help but think of him as a Neil Gaiman self-insertion. When he travels around the US and sees stuff and thinks about it, you're very aware that you're reading a piece of the author's travel journal from some time before that. Not that there's anything inherently wrong about main characters based on oneself... I mean, the same author did the same thing in Neverwhere and that was fine. But the setting in that book was entirely fantasy, and the setting in Gods is a bunch of places that Gaiman has visited and found interesting or amusing for reasons he will now tell you about. It's fun to read, mind you, but... not the novel I was looking for. So, yes, underwhelmed. I'll give it another night or two and see if it goes in any new directions.

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I'll like the book a lot more if the characters visit this place.