Good morning beautiful viewers. There is a bonus Mill Avenue Vexations story for everyone to read: “I Don’t Do That Anymore.”
It has been posted as guest content on Children of the First while author Alex McGaughan is on hiatus. His webnovel will be the only place that it will be available for a few weeks, so you should go check it out while the getting is hot.
So. I use Feedburner over at Mill Avenue Vexations and recently—semi-recently at least—I switched servers (I moved to a new place) and suddenly it cracked wide open. That is, the RSS feed stopped working.
I didn’t know this had happened.
I’m sure it hurt traffic to my site a little bit, but…that’s all better now. The boo-boo has been band-aided.
Looks like a whole seven posts were lost into limbo, so hopefully places like Technorati and their ilk will not totally lose track of me. Not that I get much traffic from them, I do like having my site listed in other places so that it does get pokes and prods from across the Internet.
With the advent of the MMORPG came an entirely new magical method to interact with a world—and far more transient an effect as well. Unlike books, newspapers, and other physical world affect the MMORPG and all of its different progeny exist with an ethereal substance that is more difficult to capture.
An article posted by the BBC right now goes over some of the interesting facts of history and virtual worlds, Writing the History of Virtual Worlds.
To ensure that the big and small events in these fledgling worlds are not forgotten, erased or overlooked, the University of Texas, Austin has kicked off a project to study the best way to preserve their history.
"It's a huge challenge for archivists to deal with digital information," said project co-ordinator Professor Megan Winget from the School of Information at the university.
Prof Winget's interest in preserving massively multi-player games grew from her involvement in digital artworks that do not hang on a wall but invite interaction, and change as a result.
"One of the most interesting problems for digital preservation is interactivity and how difficult that is to preserve," she said.
"Video games offer all of the same problems as digital art," she said. "They are interactive, very complex and a lot of people get involved in making them happen."
Digital media, history, and keeping such documents intact are interesting problems for archivists. Archives in this day and age are not looked upon kindly by states and other organizations—they are relegated to the diminishing budgets of universities and private collections. Unlike physical repositories of papers, virtual/computerized repositories suffer terrible attrition when their money dries up—a physical repository of papers may be in a warehouse that gets shut up for a few years, disused, but generally intact when the proprietors come back (some elements of famous repositories have survived to this day because the workers took boxes home when they were closed.) This is not true with data centers, which, unlike warehouses, are at an absolute premium. Once they are shut down the data is obliterated, not simply set aside. Although valiant archivists could save data for future generations by taking it home also…this isn’t a common miracle for this field.
Virtual words are becoming an interesting insertion into the lives of the 21st century. To the extent that entire recombination of the narrative occur in them, changing the very trademarks and internal structures of the stories that drive them. Much like any book or movie or TV series.
So the problem of recording and saving these events for posterity falls to the digital archivists; the strange heroes of virtual history who have taken up that mantle.
So. My ever-lovely amaranth of a server, Willowisp, has been offline for nearly a week now due to the move. A dreadful thing for me because my soul is somehow stitched to the very motherboard of that machine and I like to have her to use… So this has been a bit wearing of an experience.
Avast, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Today and yesterday CAT5e cables have been burrowing through the walls and emerging from place-to-place. Something that when complete, I hope to be able to bring my lovely maiden of electronic joy back to the land of the wakeful and use her again.
Primarily because it would be nice to play around with getting websites like Vox Ex Machina back online and start to work on the three different webserials that have possible incarnations that yet are twinkles in my eyes.
Oh yes, the cables – they’re blue.
For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of getting into this story yet, thou should stomp on down to Mill Avenue Vexations and read “No, I Do Not Want Fries With That.”
It’s a very short story about how Vex Harrow met the Burger King in Yellow and what he tried to do to her and what she did do to him.
There is a worm on the loose. A SQL injection worm. A vicious little mealy mouthed slobbering parasite that opportunistically infects certain exploits in web software. And it hit one of my projects and this makes me a very unhappy. It is that today I spent a lot of time prowling the database with a flamethrower and machete doing in every malicious byte of its gruesome progeny.
For those who haven’t met this particularly pernicious bug, a word of caution: it will ruin thy day.
If thou happen to run an Apache server, I suggest heading on over to 0x000000.com and taking a look at the .htaccess suggestions there. I certainly took a few more to add to my defense script and it has done well to prevent the furtherance of this nuisance.
In particular this line will stop this beast in its tracks:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^.*(;|<|>|'|"|\)|%0A|%0D|%22|%27|%3C|%3E|%00).*(/\*|union|select|insert|cast|set|declare|drop|update|md5|benchmark).* [NC,OR]
The malicious worm (which was insanely active on August 9th, 2008) depends on a SQL DECLARE, SET, and CAST statement all of which occur after some URL encoding and other tricks, which this line does an excellent job of ferreting out.
Onwards to battle. Onwards to a cleaner web experience.
I am going to be on a short hiatus. Hopefully nobody will notice because my posting schedule is every three days or so.
Today everything vanishes from this house and moves over to the new one. This means the server, me, my computers, everything must go - go - go.
Next time I make a post it will either be from my new room (escaped from the dustbunny revolt) or from a cafe with Wifi access.
Although I am not the only person to notice this. I still have to mention it because it really tickled the cockles of my heart: it would appear that the upcoming movie, Babylon AD, Vin Diesel's character has a tattoo that pays homage to the Seal of the Necronomicon.
Is it not beautiful?
As many more will probably notice (see above for reference) there is a definite resemblance. Also, way to go for word-of-mouth advertising. This will catch the attention of every Lovecraft and occult aficionado in the universe.
It is day two of the move and the boxen are closing in. Circling off escape routes and dismantling furniture as they go. We have been holding out against this siege now for about forty-eight hours and, though the end is definitely in sight, we’re still uncertain about our future.
The most prominent element of this event is the dustbunnies. In particular those that have been mounting armies—vast fuzzy regiments armed with frizz-bombs and toothpicks—under my bed. Like bugs scrambling when their rock has been lifted, the dustbunnies quickly scattered, but not before showing their true, terrible numbers.
We have called in a mechanized division for battlefield sweep up.
Meanwhile, I sleep on a mattress on the floor, trading watches with my cabbit plushy, watching the dim flicker of the dustbunny campfires in the distance.
Mill Avenue Vexations Volume 6 has gotten a review on a goth webzine. Blogged also today on the Vexations blog. Volume 6: Writing on the Wall starts into some of the more esoteric elements of Native American culture in and around Phoenix, Arizona. It helps drive a wedge into the further plot in order to pry it open.
Much more fun stuff to come.
The literary reviewer, H. M. Garber of goth e-zine Gothic Angst, has published a review of Volume Five from Mill Avenue Vexations. People should romp on over there and check it out.
Apparently I know a lot more Abba songs than I originally thought I knew. A certain number of the bands that I like to listen to nowadays cover them with constant proficiency…
This movie was a strange romp through musical-land that left me staring in blank horror at times and snickering through my sleeve at other times. A lot of the songs felt forced, like the scene was designed deliberately to fit the music that was about to flow into it—but for the most part it was fun an amusing.
This movie definitely kept my attention to the end.
Also, Pierce Brosnan singing felt really strange.
My editor, Djen, believes that it would have been a much better movie if the main character’s mother and her friends had been played instead by drag queens. I don’t know that I entirely agree, but it would have definitely lend a better handle onto the surreal quality of the story.
Writing is an ongoing process, even published works. I may use a critique group and a copy editor, but things still tend to slip through without my noticing. As well as it may be, minor typos and errors slipping through seems to be the bane of my existence.
I recently found some typos in Mill Avenue Vexations Volume 8—and for a few minutes I was in a tizzy. I know that I do my best to quality control the manuscripts, but still minor errors make it through my vetting process.
The strange benefit is that only one-hundred copies of the printed version are indelibly marked with this error. The online versions and manuscripts on my computer are already fixed. And the next time I go to print with them (i.e. special editions) I can use the updated manuscript, and viola, error is gone.
Here’s to a cleaner, less errors lurking, future.
I had an idea recently to write some sort of script that upon visiting www.millvexations.com would create a tiny 100px-120px banner below the primary image telling visitors about a particular artist. Especially if they had visited by clicking on an advertisement somewhere…
Example, Katie de Sousa has done an extremely lovely image of Vex Harrow that I have been thinking of using for advertisements on various networks to bring in eyeball traffic. Those who take a gander at the illustration will discover that it’s indeed eye-catching.
It would probably enhance the overall usefulness of the site and shine a light on these wonderful artists who do work for Mill Avenue Vexations.
Consider this still on the drawing board for the moment…but an idea that I really do want to implement.
Went out to see the movie this weekend—the last one—and for once it wasn't just me and my editor seated in a mostly-empty theatre, there were actually people with us. And all in all, they were fairly quiet.
The new Batman movie series is really well built. It's set upon the dour, ever-grim dark hero that we came to know and love with every reiteration of the comics and cartoons. Escaping from a Disney affected Fisher Price "no edges" comic book super heroes. Of all things unacceptable for Batman.
The Dark Knight was good.
It was long. It had some issues with breathless timing and it seemed like it went on forever—but it did an excellent job of dragging out the very nascent pleasures of Bruce Wayne, Batman, and the Joker.
There were explosions, mayhem, sorrow—twists, traps, and terrible revelations. Even the stupid sappy over-narration that comes along with comic books. Gotham is decidedly a little more like New York this time and a little less like Chicago (as from Batman Begins and it's elevated trains.)
I would go on about the various elements that made it an interesting movie. From the emergent hilarity of the Joker and the transformation of Twoface…but I'm not quite ready for spoilers.
What I am annoyed about is how Heath Leger found his death in a bottle of pills. We lose more amazing entertainers to their vices. I'd like to call a moratorium on that for the next ten years.
Which, isn't just a blog, it's a comic! It has werewolves and witches and all the things that make me tingle. So I've been reading it for a while now. Thou should really go check out American Gothic Daily.
There's a couple other webcomix that I read, but they'll have to wait to get plugs from me because they're not cool enough yet to make me fan art.
I wholeheartedly endorse reading her comic and giving her love. She's certainly done a fine thing for me.
Too cute to pass up. With elections on our doorstep and the terrible mud-slinging starting, there is at least some ways to get a wedge into the political system and find some sort of cuddly interest. Here it is.
Best Friends Petition to ask the Ombama family to adopt a family dog instead of buying one from a retail store or a puppy mill.
Pet overpopulation in the United States is a strange and unruly problem. It falls outside the gaze of the everyday American because it's not as direct and potent as crime, or the Iraq war, rising fuel costs, and myriad other concerns that bleat and blare in our fast-tracked lives.
But, it is in the lest noticed of our responsibilities that true character can be found.
(via PETS 911)
The series consists of four stories--very short stories. Each one is written in the second person and sits next to an image depicting the season. Autumn, Winter, Springtime, and Summer. The stories are a cycle, they have no beginning and no end, but if read in the order of the seasons tell an entire narrative.
The beautiful artwork is painted by Sanjana Baijnath; the text written by Kyt Dotson. One of the images has even become famous, and a print is available for those who want to buy them: Vex Harrow Autumn.
It was a great deal of fun to create, the artwork is gorgeous; if you haven't read it before go check it out now.
Mill Avenue Vexations Seasons.
Well, that's the chops in the deep-down-dark world of Internet publishing. I suppose that this means current rights to my "Step On It" story have switched back to me... But it also means that nobody can read it for the time being. I posted as much about this on Mill Avenue Vexations, but it's hard to put my finger on how it makes me feel.
Even though first-publication is already over, I am going to keep casting about looking for placement in the strange dark universe of gothic fiction.
I guess this means I should take down my advertisement for Twilight & Thorns. Ah, so sad.
I do like them, they did pay me considerably more than I expected to receive from any venue for my work.
More news to come. I am commissioning artwork for Vexations and things go on. Take a wander over to the site and see what's going on... Next year has a line up of four (4) booklets already!
Mill Avenue Vexations Volume 5 has gotten a review on a goth webzine. Blogged also today on the Vexations blog. Volume 5: Drum Circle is one of my favorite volumes! It represents the first time I've been able to get a full color cover and it also has special editions released to give me money to get more full color covers.
Drum Circle also includes direct culture from the Ave, the drum circle, the street preachers, and other elements that just keep me coming back. It gives me a chance to display the strange interaction between the various groups. Take a gander at the blog post and Gothic Angst. Thanks!
The literary reviewer, H. M. Garber of goth e-zine Gothic Angst, has published a review of Volume Five from Mill Avenue Vexations. People should trot on over there and check it out.
Mill Avenue Vexations Volume 4 has gotten a review on a goth webzine. Blogged also today on the Vexations blog.
Volume 4 is full of portents and strangeness foretelling the doom coming to Phoenix. Things have been going down that are a little more on the eerie side, the drought continues, and the heat is still rising. Vex is still trying to pin down clues and strange events that she's been a part of and thing plot drives forward like a taxi to its destination.
The literary reviewer, H. M. Garber of goth e-zine Gothic Angst, has published a review of Volume Four from Mill Avenue Vexations. People should trot on over there and check it out.
Burning rubber where angels fear to tread.
