Okay, kids, this is my last post, so it’s time to take this bitch out with a bang. If I’m leaving, I’m not leaving with some pussy parting gift like a DVD. I have just ordered a 4GB silver 3rd-gen iPod Nano - that means video, kids - and one of you chickadees is walking away with it provided that we get to 3,000 comments.
This week, please. I’d like to let the head honcho know that I’m going, and when I do that depends on you.
We’re currently at 2,867 comments. Number 3,000 gets the Nano; that means we need 133 more comments. They can be on this post, on any other post, anywhere on Darkside Rainbow, as long as we hit 3,000. Spread the word; tell your friends, tell other readers, tell anyone, but let’s rack the comment count up. If we could hit 500 in one weekend (that…was psychotic), we can hit 133 in one week. You know the rules on what does and doesn’t qualify for comments by now. If you don’t, you’ll learn when your “LJSKLDJFLSJFLKSDJFKLS ;)” is number 3,000 and the person after you posting “Uh…wtf was that?” wins. Only difference is that you can still win even if you’ve won before, if you’re another blogger for 451, or even if you’re one of my friends (although the latter would be a little unfair if you haven’t previously read or commented.)
On a less abrasive note, thank you to everyone who commented on the last post explaining my reasons for leaving. I do appreciate your support and encouragement.
I’ve been thinking this over for the past few days of not posting, not having anything to say, and honestly, not really caring…and I think I’m going to be leaving 451 Press soon. A fair number of other bloggers are leaving as well. Everyone has their reasons, and they’re mostly personal, nothing to do with the network. For me, it’s the fact that I’ve had a good run for a bit over a year, but it’s time to let the dead horse rest, as I’ve said before. I’m just not feeling it anymore. I said my piece, and I know when to quit before I run this place into the ground and make it a mockery of itself. It’s something like authors– ~coughsLaurellKHamiltoncoughs~ –who won’t let a series go even though it jumped the shark years ago and the last several books have been a pathetic laughingstock. I don’t ever want to reach those levels in anything that I do.
Well, that and on a mercenary note, I’m not paid nearly enough for the amount of time and work I put into this place, and I’ve really been doing it for the fun of it and for no other reason.
I’m not leaving quite yet. I haven’t turned in my official resignation or really told anyone beyond this, and mentioning earlier that I was thinking about it. I’d wanted to wrap up the 3,000 comments contest before I go; I’d said I was giving away a copy of Velvet Goldmine and I am, damn it all. We have roughly 150 comments to go. I may throw another comments party this weekend, but basically…once we hit that mark and someone wins, I’m turning in my official resignation.
It’s been fun, but I’ve moved on to bigger and better things. DR and 451 Press were a great stepping stone to get me there, but it’s time to step away.
Plus, damn it, I’m trying to finish another novel.
…er. Remember that day I took off to play with my new Cintiq 12WX, only to spend the whole day troubleshooting it? Well, Wacom finally shipped me a new one and it works, so I’m pretty useless for anything else today. besidesit’smybirthdayandIhaveahorribletoothachesocutmesomeslack. So…er…go play with the captions contest, submit your entries, win an Amazon gift card. I’m gonna go futz with Manga Studio EX until the bloody thing recognizes the Cintiq drivers. ~flees~
DR Live Webcast, this Sunday, 5p CST. Hell, I almost forgot about it, let alone forgot to remind you guys. Speaking of not being politically correct…~eyes his notes and whistles~ …yyyyyeah. I’ll be offending someone, no doubt. Don Imus wouldn’t even touch this one.
Guys? No post today. Yesterday was a wreck, I got behind on work again, and I need today to catch up. I can’t even think of anything gay-related to say today.
Yeah, I know I haven’t updated yet today. I spent yesterday struggling to get my Cintiq to work, only to find out after testing on three different computers and making three phone calls to Wacom (after which I was requested to send photos and video) that some component of the Cintiq is a dud. Needless to say that after wanting one of these for years and spending $1,000 for the damn thing, I was not only disappointed, but swimming in a frothing haze of my own pissed-mist. They’re overnighting me a new converter box so we can see if that’s the problem before we try swapping the tablet itself, but that doesn’t salvage all the time I spent yesterday fighting with the thing when I should have been working. I got behind on my new job and I’m spending today catching up.
What does that mean? I have no time for ranting about anything sensible, humorous, thought provoking, or just plain provocative. But I will give you a quick update on two things:
3,000 Comments Contest
We are currently at 2,650 cumulative comments, which means exactly 350 comments until someone wins a copy of Velvet Goldmine in the appropriate regional format and the media format (DVD or VHS) of their choice. Ooh. Aahh. Shiny. Yeah, I know. Might help if I said something worth commenting to. Life is hectic right now. Blogging is at the bottom of my list, unfortunately. Trying not to strangle a particular someone is at the top. [/cryptic]
Third Darkside Rainbow Live Webcast
Yeah, I’m finally going to do another webcast. We’ll shoot for Sunday, April 6th at 5:00p CST. In it you will get to listen to me bitch about being almost 30, and deal with a loooooooong tirade about my old job and some of the rather fun “quirks” that went with it, now that I’m no longer leashed and gagged by my employment with them and can publicly mock them without fearing loss of a job I gladly quit. I’m sure there’ll be something gay-themed in there. Somewhere. You know how I feel about making everything gay. My life is not painted rainbow or pink, thank you.
That’s all; I really need to get back to work now (sometimes the discipline involved in setting your own schedule kinda sucks). See you tomorrow, when hopefully I’ll be able to settle down and write a decent post during my usual breakfast stop at McDonald’s en route to the library.
Sorry, guys. Cintiq. Tech lust trumps updating obligations, hands down. Look at it as my version of the cliche of webcomic artists who vanish for a week when a new game comes out - only I’ll be back tomorrow.
~shifty eyes~
Maybe.
…what? Stop looking at me like that; it’s a Cintiq! ~flees to play with his new gadget~
Okay, I’ve been saving this for a day when I was too brain-dead to write anything substantive, and today definitely fits that bill. You don’t want to know how late I was up last night working, but the timestamps on the cracked-out commentfest to yesterday’s post should give you an idea. A while ago Sandra over at Globally Green Living tagged me with a meme (aren’t we just the little scions of journalistic integrity?), something about posting seven fascinating things you may or may not know about me.
Er. I’m not good at being fascinating, but here’s me being a good little memesheep and posting seven things anyway.
1. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a neurologist. No, seriously. I was fascinated by the human brain, loved the term medulla oblongata, and thought I’d spend the rest of my life researching synaptic behavior. That was before I got sidetracked by a passion for jet propulsion and weeks spent studying breakdowns of jet engine parts and the progression of jet engine technology over decades. What? I was a dorky kid.
2. It’s not unlikely to find me talking to myself like a crazy street corner prophet while in the grocery store, walking down the street, or even cleaning the kitchen. This includes heated back-and-forth conversations muttered under my breath. It’s not as crazy as it sounds, and it generally only happens when I’m in the middle of working on a story. I often work out dialogue as I’m doing other things away from the computer, and I tend to mutter the speech of the various characters in a conversation to myself while working out natural-sounding dialogue…complete with mimicking their accents. (Sihaya, stop imagining me doing Sujit’s voice.)
3. I refuse to eat anything that comes from a pig. …except bacon and pepperoni. No idea why; I just hate pork and all pork-related products. ~shudders~ Ham makes me gag.
4. I can curse in fourteen different languages. Don’t ask for a demonstration. Cyrillic characters don’t carry over well in browsers anyway, and you can be damned sure I’d pick Russian; the curses are always strange, creative, and the language just sounds so deliciously vulgar. (Although Greek isn’t much better; the weird things they come up with as insults…)
5. Even though I’m almost 28 years old, I cannot sleep at night if I watch a scary movie just before bed. Which is disgusting, considering that in my cynicism I don’t believe in ghost, monsters, spooks, and various other things supernatural. It doesn’t change that I have a hyperactive imagination and just the right sort of battiness, peculiar to writers, that enables me to convince myself that yes, that lump under the covers really is the creepy chick from The Grudge rather than just my cat. Or my feet. I know, I need to grow the hell up and stop pulling the “I’m a speshul writerly snowflake with a speshul imagination!” card. Laurell K. Hamilton, I am not. (Gods, I hope I don’t write that badly.)
6. Despite the vituperative way that I express myself, my overall jaded nature, and a heaping ton of bitterness, I’m actually a much happier person than most people think. I may have certain stark beliefs and a rather coldly pragmatic outlook on life, and have no qualms about deadpanning a scathing retort to someone’s overly-chirpy syrupyness…but on a day-to-day basis, I’m generally cheerful, silly, playful, prone to laughing easily and smiling often. I still don’t talk much out loud if I can get away with it (shut up Hikaru, I know we’re over 9,000 minutes), but even when worked to the bone I’m too busy slogging towards the finish to let myself be unhappy. I’m still a grouch, but I’m a happy grouch. Hush. It works, somehow.
7. And, just to be a little vulgar…I am terrified of black men’s cocks. No, it’s not the purported size; nor is it a race thing. It had better not be; I’m part African-American (wholly, if you listen to the state of Louisiana and the idiotic Napoleonic code), and there are plenty of black men that I find unbearably attractive (Will Smith, Taye Diggs, one of my ex-boyfriends, this boy Jason Thomas that I had a completely lovelorn crush on in high school, Usher as long as he’s dancing and not trying to act)…as long as they keep their jockeys on. It’s the color. The penis is not a particularly attractively-hued thing no matter the ethnicity/skin tone of the male mammalian sporting it; I’m not even pretending that mine is the prettiest thing out there. But that dark, purple-brown, muddied slickness of African-American cock just frightens me silly, and I refuse to touch it unless the lights are out or my eyes are closed.
That’s it. I’m supposed to tag seven more people (half of whom have probably done this already), so I tag…um…
And…um…um…oh, to hell with it. I’m tagging all of you. Post your seven things in the comments, tagging optional (who are you going to tag around here, anyway?). I’m going to take a nap, then get back to work.
Not updating today, kids. Sorry. I still adore you; you’re still my candy-coated 9-volt vibrators of love. (…wait, candy-coated, maybe that shouldn’t be…wouldn’t that cause…ew, nevermind.) You’re going to have to be patient with me until about March 10th or so; right now I’m working double-duty on crap for Old!Job and writing/editing for New!Job, along with this job and a few others. 60-70 hour work weeks are not fun and make for a pissy, snarly Adri. I will be updating every weekday from this point out, but I can’t promise it’ll be in the mornings as I’ll have to write when I have time and when I can think of something to say.
Right now, honestly, I can’t think of anything to say. I wanted to talk about the fact that a monument is finally being built to honor gays who suffered under the Nazi regime, and kept trying to work up a decent post…but I’m a little too scatterbrained trying to get my sh*t together for New!Job and work out how I’m going to handle this to even think of anything to say. We can count today as a day off…or even as a moment of silence for those honored for their suffering.
Guys, I won’t be updating this morning, though I’ll throw something up when I get back. I have to run out the door to run errands and have very little time to do it. A few notes for a few people:
Kaine: One of the errands I’m running is finally swinging by the post office to mail off your MP3 player. Sorry it’s taken me so long; post office is a two-mile trip without a car.
Indikaze, Lessa, and Barbara: I put in your Cafepress orders last night; as Indikaze already knows, I’m a procrastinating slob and tend to do things roughly a week to two weeks after I say I will. Plus I was waiting to hear back from a couple of other people, then gave up on waiting. Cafepress says delivery in 4-7 business days, even in Alaska.
JM and Sam: Still haven’t heard back from either of you about what you want for winning the 100-comments portion of the contest.
Okay, I’m running short on time and my hair’s still sticking up everywhere and I’m not even dressed; hafta flee.
If you’ve been trying to load this site for the past several hours (and missed today’s post), sorry everything’s been down. There was…a mess. A huge, nasty mess in the data center hosting our servers, so tangled and convoluted that it could only reasonably be called a clusterfsck. Only some sites were affected, but for those of us who were, it’s been a real pain in the petuckus waiting for everything to come back up again.
To make a long story short (basically paraphrasing the enormous statement from the data center that our Head Honcho copied over to the writer forum): Brief power outage. Generator runs for a little while, then transfers main load to the UPS. Main batteries fail. Backup batteries fail right after that. Generators go back online, troubleshooting starts. Backbone connectivity goes FTTZZZ because something went screwy with one of the switches. Half the backbones die, the other half start screaming in pain from carrying the full load. An access switch serving 16 servers died a grisly, brutal, screaming death. Oh, an APC failed too. Think we’re done? Oh, hell no. Some of the servers just tanked due to the power-related forced reboot, and have to be manually restored with an fsck (file system check, you pervs).
Or, to put it very simply, boom. Boom today, boom tomorrow. Sooner or later, always boom.
Yyyyeah. So when our data centers do FUBAR, they don’t half-arse it. To quote another 451 Press writer: “This definitely seems like the deluxe, full-ass version of FUBAR.”
We’re back up now, though. In the future, if the site’s dead and you’re wondering what happened, you can always check my personal blog at zenunlimited.com. If anything’s wrong and I know about it, I’ll post updates there.
What? What are you still staring at? The real content’s one post below. Go. Be outraged. Be pragmatic. Be apathetic. Be…something. I don’t know. I’m going to go be productive and write something. Later.
Go ahead and kill me for the post title. I know I would.
Sorry I didn’t update today, everyone. Life just…got in the way, and I haven’t had time to write anything coherent. I’ll be back with a new post in the morning. See you then.
Kids, this is going to have to count for your update for today. I am, at the moment, sulking and not ashamed to admit it - and since today’s a day off of work, I’m going to take advantage of it despite my sentiment towards the holiday. Not in the way I’d hoped - which is why I’m sulking - but if I can’t at least get a little tipsy and relax (thanks to cheap, flimsy plastic bags, a broken bottle of merlot, 12a alcohol sale cutoff times, and an absolutely disgusted mood that guarantees I won’t be venturing back out at 7a to buy another), I’ll compensate by being a lazy bum about writing anything of substance. You may want to read through this anyway, as I’ll need your feedback on something.
Changes to the DR Streaming Radio
It may or may not be live by the time you read this (that sidebar box only updates changes once every four hours), but I’ve replaced the streaming radio that was coming from my hard drive via a Microsoft Media Server stream and playing by a buggy WMP plugin. Instead I’ve loaded the files as separate MP3s into a Flash player called JW Player, which everyone should be able to use. If that slow-as-molasses sidebar still hasn’t updated yet, you can try it out below:
It doesn’t autostart (my preference) and streams everything from my personal domain, putting less strain on my laptop’s CPU. (It also avoids giving my ISP a heart attack over a streaming upload of 403MB of uncompressed media cycling 24/7, but I’m sure my web host will compensate by popping a blood vessel or two over bandwidth usage.)
It’s much nicer to use and look at, lets you switch between tracks, shuffles on default but lists alphabetically to make it easy to scroll to your favorite tracks, and organizes the track info in a painstakingly compiled playlist (that I probably made a typo on somewhere, knowing me). Since it’s Flash, it should work in pretty much any browser on any OS.
I had a reason for screwing with the live media broadcast, though, and that little WMP plugin isn’t gone for good.
Darkside Rainbow Live Interactive Webcast
You read that right, a live interactive webcast. That’s why I was experimenting with MMS streams coming live from my computer, and with Windows Media Encoder. One evening in December - I haven’t decided which yet, depends on the feedback I get from you guys - I’ll be hosting a live, one-hour radio talk show. You’ll be able to tune in via your web browser and the WMP plugin (by the way, I figured out why it wasn’t working in IE, so that will be less of a problem) or your default streaming media player; there’ll also be a live chat room that you can join to talk to others listening to the webcast and talk to me while I’m on-air. If you miss the webcast or it doesn’t work in your browser or OS, I’ll be posting an MP3 recording of it after the fact along with a transcript from the chat room.
Those of you who’ve known me for a while know that every once in a while I’d post pre-recorded rants to the old site. This…this is going to be very different, and possibly very awkward and embarrassing, but I’m game to give it a shot at least once to see how it works out. On the recordings I could work out what I wanted to say ahead of time, read it off, practice, and re-record if I flubbed. Live and responding on the fly to the chat room…oh, man. That has the potential for hilarious disaster. It might be worth it to tune in just to listen to me fall flat on my face. Some days I sound like a Oxford scholar, and some days I’m so amazingly inarticulate that I can’t even pronounce my own name.
…and some days I can say “low-density polyethylene compound” or “deoxyribonucleic acid” at top speed without missing a beat, but will get tongue-tied on “hello”.
Let me know if you’d be interested in listening in, and if you have any ideas for anything you want to hear me rant about, as right now I have no idea what I’ll talk about for an hour…though in the interests of staying on-topic, it really ought to be GBLTQ-related, hm? I can also do Q/A sessions on the webcast, or answer Ask Adri questions, so e-mail those in or send ‘em using the contact form if you want to get yours answered on air. Try to keep them brief, though, so I’m not spending twenty minutes just reading your letter out loud. Hell, if you want me to do shoutouts to your friends or something like that, I won’t mind.
If you want to tell me around what times would be best for you (and your local time zone), that’ll help me determine a date and hour to do this, as well. If I can nerve myself to. I get the feeling this is a catastrophe waiting to happen - but at least if I go down, I’ll go down flaming proudly (no pun intended).
And hey, if it turns out all right and moves smoothly, we might make a weekly or monthly thing out of it. Why the hell not.
I’m out of here, now. Happy…that day. Yeah, that day.
Seriously, though, I hope you’re all enjoying yourselves. Ciao, until tomorrow. I and my lack of wine are going to go sulk with a new DVD.
Guys, I’ll be posting a real update later after the coffee’s done brewing, but right now I need you to answer a question for me:
Does the little streaming radio plugin in the sidebar automatically start playing for you when you load the page, or does it not start until you hit Play or load the mms:// stream directly into your media player from the link? I’ve got autoplay completely turned off in the embedding code as I find it wholly obnoxious to load a page in which music is forced on me and I have to hunt for a way to turn it off. So far everyone I’ve asked except one person has said that it didn’t start until they told it to. I’m trying to figure out if it’s really auto-starting for her or if she’s just trying to be a special little snowflake.
Let me know what browser and OS you’re using, as well. I’m planning to use the streaming plugin for monthly events later (I’ll explain more soon, promise) so it’ll help to know just how it behaves in readers’ browsers.
Thanks, and I’ll be back in a bit with something actually topical.
~Adri
P.S. Stop laughing at me for having a playlist full of Asian pop and rock. I have a very broad spectrum of musical tastes, but kept to mostly international music or remixes or things from game and film scores to keep the RIAA off my butt and out of 451 Press’s hair regarding music broadcasts from any artists they “own”. This is streaming directly from my hard drive, so who knows what else I might deem safe to throw on there as I poke through my vast musical collection.
DarksideRainbow.net is 451 Press's look at the darker side of the
rainbow - where gay life takes a decided turn away from the happy, the
shiny, and the pink, complete with news, gossip, and a healthy dose of
caffeine-fueled cynicism from gay blogger Adrien-Luc Sanders. Check in
Monday through Friday for a decidedly tongue-in-cheek slant on current
events in the GLBTQ world, spiced with a few fun rants.
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