Sillybean

On the (nick)naming of characters

Halfway-plus through Sherwood Smith’s delightful Inda, I must pause and bitch: DAW, why O why did you not include the character list in the published book? Because, Christ on a crutch! In addition to the usual firstname-lastname thing, each school-age character gets two more names at the academy: an official name formed from the family name and a word meaning “one” or “two” depending whether they’re the older or younger sibling (e.g. Landred Marlo-Vayir becomes Marlo-Vayir Tvei), as well as a nickname used to the exclusion of the others (Cherry-Stripe). The -Vayir suffix on the family names has its own meaning. Adults are referred to, interchangeably, by their full names and by a title having to do with their place in succession and military role. And? Some of the titles change when the country goes to war.

My head hurts. Memo to publishers: sometimes we don’t get the luxury of consuming a 600-page paperback in one sitting. Sometimes, you know, we have to put the book down for a couple of days at a time. And when the number of characters with three to four names apiece climbs north of, say, twenty… it helps to provide an index. I’m just sayin’.

It has occurred to me, reading some of the Shadow Unit extras this weekend, that newcomers to that world must have the same problem. In the LiveJournals, the characters refer to each other using nicknames that seldom make it into the episodes proper. Fortunately the wiki lists them all. (At least, I think that’s all of them.)

A bookish day

Today is a good day. Ink & Steel is out. I think Bear was still working on this when I began reading her LJ, because this was the first thing of hers I remember wanting to read. When the Jenny books came out, I was like, “Eh. That’s nice. But where’s Will & Kit’s Bogus Journey?!” And here it is at last.

Havemercy looks interesting and is getting tons of great reviews. The description makes it sound a bit like His Majesty’s Dragon, which is great unless it’s followed by a string of disappointing sequels. Threw that into the Amazon cart too.

My Lord and Spymaster is also out today. I LOVED The Spymaster’s Lady, especially the way dialogue and accents are done, so I can’t wait to read this.

Alas, I’m busy with work this week, and won’t get much reading time. In fact, Jhegaala will be out before I get around to this week’s haul.

It occurs to me that it’s been ages since I did a review round-up. Here’s what I’ve read recently-ish:

(cut because this got very long) (more…)

Snow Leopard cannot get here fast enough

As if the hosting disaster weren’t bad enough, my laptop is increasingly unstable. For months, it’s been refusing to shut all the way down, failing on Time Machine backups, and generally being flaky. Today it’s suddenly much worse. It has stopped recognizing my USB hub, and now Numbers and Excel are both crashing on startup. (I CAN’T HAZ SPREDSHEET.)

Also crashing on startup? SuperDuper, which I need to make a good backup since Time Machine isn’t working. And I need at least one good backup before I can wipe this thing and reinstall from scratch, which appears to be needed. I’ve tried repairing the disk and permissions, archive & installing… nothing’s working.

I want to curl up and cry. Because it’s not like this happened in the middle of a big freelance job or anything.

My machines were always so reliable before Leopard…

Hobbling

So my host had a rather catastrophic disk failure on Wednesday. After much thrashing around, they’ve restored us using an old file backup. The databases are fine (otherwise you wouldn’t be seeing this), but files and email were restored from May 15. They might be able to recover the rest, but they might not.

For this site, that means not much lost — some of our trip photos, and the Utilikilt one, but I can restore those when I get some spare time. More troubling is the fact that if you’ve emailed me since May 15, I no longer have a copy. (Update: lost mail recovered.) And if it was in the last 48 hours, I didn’t see it at all. (Update: this mail still lost.)

Most of the other sites I host are fine. The less-used ones hadn’t been touched since before the backup, and are fine apart from some possibly lost email.

Seekrit Project #1… well, this is a setback.

My online writing group is inexplicably dead in the water, even though it should be running with just the recent file attachments missing. That one gets priority.

Status

Major work project #1: 90% done.
Major work project #2: ... yeah, I should get started on that.

Seekrit project #1: 99% done. Waiting on other people¹ and, predictably, a bugfix for IE6.
Seekrit project #2: 80% done.
Seekrit project #3: at best 5% done, but got a jump start this week.

Steph: 100% tired.

¹ While I’m waiting on others, if you have PHP on your web server and would like to beta test a little something — it won’t take long — leave a comment and I’ll email you the details.