The Stuff in my Head - Freakies

In 1974, I'd have been about 6 years old, in Kindergarden, and watching Star Trek in syndication on Channel 2 out of Denver, and that year, the video below hit the airwaves, nestled amongst the saturday morning cartoons. This is the stuff that sticks with me. This is the stuff in my head. For no reason I can fathom save repetition and impressionability, I can still recall the refrain from this exact jingle, on key, and with the correct lyrics and pacing, though I can't remember the actual video (save that I just watched it), and I certainly never saw it in color.



As for Freakies themselves, I recall I convinced my mother to buy me a box at one point, and they were so bad that even a six-year-old's sweet tooth wasn't enough to make me gag them down. I recall it being a stinging disappointment, and I never quite forgave the makers of the cereal for it.

According to the wikipedia article, the cereal itself lasted only two more years, which suggests a lot of people had the same experience.

Now, if only I could get this jingle out of my head. There are far more useful things I'd like to remember so permanently.

-JRS

New Look on the Website

If you haven't visited the website in the last few hours, there's a new look on it, and some code tweaking in the background. Please let me know what you think, and especially if it doesn't work right for you. I haven't had time to really sanitize it so it's 100% standards compliant, and I know it's very broken for old versions of IE - which I intend to drop support for in the coming overhaul anyway.

-JRS

MileHiCon Schedule

It's MileHiCon time again, and once again, I'm on the schedule. :) So if you're looking for me, here's where and when to look:

4:00pm Friday - Wind River B - Author reading with Donita K. Paul.

3:00pm Saturday - Wind River B - Psychology of Fandom Panel


11:00pm Saturday - 12th floor - Exquisite Corpse Reading with A. Bugg, T Kroenung, and N. Leyba.

2:00pm Sunday - Wind River A - Bionics now and in the future (I'm moderating this one)

This year, I'll be handing out some promotional thingies, starting at my reading on Friday, and after that there will be a basket of them out somewhere. I'll probably save some to give out at the Exquisite Corpse reading too.

Hope to see y'all there.

-JRS

Donald Duck discovers Glenn Beck's talk radio show

A great mashup cartoon, which the creators assert is covered under fair use because it's a parody. Given Disney's stance on copyrights, I expect their lawyers will disagree expensively come Monday, so I'd say get it while it's hot.

Ebook Geekery

I happened to look over my April 5th posting on Ebook toolsets for mac, and on a lark, followed the links again. Turns out Kindlegen has been updated, and also, Amazon has released a kindle previewer for mac and PC.

Full info HERE.

I'm looking at Calibre's underlying command-line tools, and starting to think that it may be time to revisit how I generate the HTML for my ebooks. I do a lot of work cleaning up after the html generator I'm currently using. I need to poke at Calibre generally and see what parts of the front-end of ebook generation it can do for me without sacrificing the control I've come to want. I'm not investing any time in it right now, as I have no new content to put into ebook format(s), but there may come a time rather soon.

 

-JRS

Comment counting fixed again

It looks like Blogger has changed their comment feeding system again, this time for the better. There's now an explicit value in the feed, where magpie can get at it, that says how many comments have been made. So I've modified the newsfeeder again to use that new value. If you notice anything other than working comment counts and a performance increase (you really don't want to know how I was counting comments before. Really) please let me know.



-JRS

Brass and Steel: SOLD! :)

Yesterday was a red-letter day for me. I sold my first short story ever. Brass and Steel is slated to appear in Science Fiction Trails some time in December.

My short summary of it goes like this:

After winning a 12 year war with the Hive; a mysterious organization of techno-zombies called Doppelgängers and their human supporters; the United States has had two years to rebuild and exploit the technology looted from their conquered foes. The result has been a steampunk explosion of Victorian proportions. In a thriving gold town called Perdition, Marshal Dante Blackmore, once a soldier and an investigator for the War Department, tries to keep the peace, and mops up any leftover doppelgängers that turn up. An adventuress named Jo seeks him out with an urgent story to tell...

I must say about the Brass and Steel world, that it was fun to write in, and fun to create. Steampunk by its nature isn't a hard-scifi genre, and I can see why people write the other kind. It's fun. I got to spend my research time on things like 19th century American slang, and things like that. :) I may have to revisit the world. I don't think I've spent all its DNA yet.

JRS

Technorati Tags: Brass and Steel