A pumpkin again this time

Another Halloween, another hollow fruit. I considered a watermelon this year, but they aren't in season. I also considered a few different kinds of squash out of apparent necessity, seeing only small and moldy pumpkins at the Home Depot where we happened to be looking for pumpkins and storm supplies.* We decided to have a go at another store, though, and they had plenty of pumpkins, so we bought one.

I've tried to be arch or clever with my Jack-o-lantern designs for the past few years, maybe because I had housemates to impress. This year I tried a design or two that amused me but I settled on something more sincerely creepy. Maybe because I've been reading so much Lovecraft. But this is what I came up with:

Not bad, I think. Thought you might like to see.

Sweet dreams.

* We're fine, by the way. The power stayed on, obviously, since it's still on and now I'm posting to my blog. There's a swampy patch in the basement, but we've had worse.

Avant le déluge

Why am I still sick?

It's getting less amusing. I guess it was never amusing, since it started with me throwing up in bed. Or, possibly, I got sick and got better briefly, and this is the sequel; but if it is a sequel, it's a sequel like The Two Towers, and was in post-production while the first installment was in theaters.

I think there's something to the sequel theory. A lot of the plot points have changed, and the original villain has been replaced. Fatigue and coughing aren't nearly as intimidating as nausea. Which is a negative for a movie but a positive for an illness.

I might be staying home from judo if promotionals weren't next week. As it is, I've still got things to learn, so I go. Specifically, I'd really like to learn how to do this before the test:

It's hard!

If those problems aren't immediate enough, we've got some kind of Voltron hurricane aimed at the upper east coast, throwing people into a panic. I mostly expect that the impending doom is overhyped, but I did buy water and matches today.

NaNoWriMo is approaching fast. I've had some breakthroughs talking to Girlfriend about her story, but I haven't actually figured out what I'm doing. I could continue with Myrddin, although that story is getting too big to write in one-month increments at a one- or two-year interval without producing major plot holes. I could also do something in the fantasy world that spun off from the D&D campaign that everyone seemed to like, but I haven't gotten a handle on the characters yet. I've also considered a sort of Lovecraft-inspired modern thingamajig, but I don't think I could ramble well enough to NaNo if I wrote in a modern idiom.

Indescribeable horror on Netflix

As I continue to delve into the works of H.P. Lovecraft, my primary happy impression is that he clearly got better with practice. I hit a vein of quality around "The Call of Cthulhu" onwards.

CoC was interesting enough, although most of it has seeped into the popular culture already to the point that, if you have an interest in Lovecraft, reading it the first time is almost like re-reading it. (It is also possible that I read the story in the CoC RPG rulebook and then forgot, which would explain the sensation.) It's a good example of most of the best and some of the worst of HPL's writing: vivid cosmic forces, lightly sketched humans. Lovecraft often seems to treat characters as a formality; in CoC humans mostly exist to relay information to the reader. On the other hand, he gets over his accustomed aversion to actually describe what, you know, the story is about. Cthulhu actually gets as good a description as we could want, which is why it's possible to crochet tiny ones, if we want to.

I indulged a bad habit while reading it, and kept thinking about how it would work as a movie. Last night I found out that someone else thought the same thing, but better. In 2005 the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society made a movie of "The Call of Cthulhu." It's on Netflix.

Which I would have thought would be a horrible idea. I think an attempt to adapt the story straight into a movie wouldn't have worked, but the HPLHS borrowed a page from Lovecraft's own geometry book, a drew a line that was straighter than straight--so straight that it cut through space-time. They made the movie as it would have been made if it had been made at the same time as the story: so, in 1928. Which means it's a silent film, which is a brilliant stroke. (I wrote "a brilliant stork" first. It is not that.) For one thing, it gets around the sparseness of HPL's dialogue. It distances. And yes, it makes me feel smart to like it.

They also made the special effects plausible circa 1928. This, too, I found brilliant, ultimately. It doesn't do Lovecraft's monstrosities justice, but neither, really would modern CGI. They might create something believable, something with tentacles, but of course that would be half the battle, and winning one half would be losing the other half. After all, the point is more that you can't register what you're seeing, not the tentacles and so on. Dated effects almost fortify your suspension of disbelief in this day and age.

So, in summary, if you have Netflix, watch The Call of Cthulhu. It's only 45 minutes long.

Not being up to it

Grumble grumble. Still sick. Just barely, but just enough. For a while now I have been vacillating over whether to compete in a judo tournament my club is holding a mile from my house. I hoped to fight, but then this flu or what-have-you happened, and I spent the two weeks ahead of the tournament convalescing instead of getting my act together. So my act is not together, which is disappointing. However, when I went down to the venue yesterday to help lay the mats out, and doing that made me dizzy, I felt justified in passing this tournament up. But, bah. I am frustrated.

At Thursday's judo practice we had some mock matches to prepare people for the upcoming tournament. The experience made me more determined to compete on some level, somewhere, because I realized that I'm awful under pressure. When my turn came up and people started watching me, the world got a little blurrier. The echoing corridors between my brain and my muscles spontaneously filled up with cotton. All this just because we were pretending for a minute that it mattered. So this is something I ought to get over, not only in judo but generally, if possible.

Projects are advancing, even if nothing got finished this week. NaNoWriMo is coming. I need to figure out what to write. (And I should finish 12 before November starts.)

Cooling issues

It's gotten to the point where you could fry an egg over my laptop's hard drive. I'm considering renaming my power settings "Over Easy," "Over Hard," and "Bacon."

It all started when... well, it all started when I bought my laptop five years ago, but this isn't that kind of story. (Anyway, if the moral of this story is that HP laptops have a five-year life cycle, I really want to punch someone.) So let's say it started when the fans of my laptop cooler died, and soon thereafter I developed an urge to play Guild Wars 2. In the fullness of time my money was gone, and GW2 was on my computer.

Now, back in the day, my laptop would overheat playing the original Guild Wars if I wasn't conscientious about propping it up properly, so it seemed reasonable that the sequel might run hot, too. Additionally, I recalled that I had never, in the machine's five-year life, removed any dust from it. Now that I look into laptop maintenance, I find that going five years without cleaning your laptop is like going five years without cleaning your baby, if dirty toddlers caught fire. (They don't, right?)

I went to the internet and found people with similar problems being advised to blow compressed air into the vents in their laptop to get the dust out, so I did that.

Perhaps the impertinently directed blasts of cold air angered the fire elemental which animates my laptop. (They have those, right?) Anyway, things got hotter instead of getting colder.

I revisited the advice I found on the internet, and found other people issuing dire warnings to never just blow air into your laptop at random, you crazy fool. It just makes things worse. So now I know that.

Apparently what you have to do is open your computer up and get at the heat sink assembly and, if you've treated your laptop like I have, remove the rodentlike mass of dust with tweezers. So I unscrewed the panels on the back of my laptop. I found hard drives. I found a battery glued to a circuit board. I had to go back to the internet to figure out how to get at the heat assembly, and what I found, everywhere I looked, was that for my type of laptop, the HP dv6700, in order to access the heat assembly you have to disassemble the laptop entirely and detach everything from everything else. The inner workings of this machine are encased in layers of armor serving no apparent purpose except to keep dust in, and non-HP-employees out.

If my livelihood did not depend entirely on this machine, I might make the attempt. I have spent hours finding instructions for how to do it, with all the different kinds of screws labelled. In the mean time, I am playing Guild Wars 2 while soothing my machine's fevered brow with medical ice packs (and also a new cooling stand). Otherwise, the game just doesn't play.

The other day my laptop opened up a seam and spat out a screw--literally spat, with allowances made for the lack of literal lips. I think my laptop is daring me to crack it open.

As if to inflict empathy with my laptop's plight, on Wednesday I was afflicted with a miserable fever. It took me a while, but through trial and error I discovered that if I got too hot, I threw up--this while my body was shivering, begging me for blankets, mind you. Vomiting at least made the chills go away, but I learned that I could choose between being cold and being ill. So I started applying the ice packs to myself instead of my wretched computer, with similar success--that is, limping but very real success.

Anyway, that got steadily less terrible as the week went on. I have to profusely thank Girlfriend, who dealt with me like a saint no matter how pathetic I got or what I threw up on, and all while suffering through a less violent incarnation of the same disease.

Looking back on this post, I have to say that if you knew about some of the turns of phrase I came up with but didn't use, you would thank me.

Update: Girlfriend's parents are coming to visit today (imminently, in fact), which means someone has to vacuum. Luckily, we bought a vacuum a month ago for just this purpose, after the old one died a slow and ineffectual death--but we hadn't used it until today.

Guess what safety feature our new vacuum cleaner has. Guess. Yes: a thermal shutoff. And to further protect me, the thermal shutoff is on a timer, so the vacuum can't turn back on for 30 minutes, regardless of the temperature.

I don't know why the damn thing shut off after three minutes of use, or again 33 minutes later, but clearly Hoover thinks that I am too dumb to vacuum a carpet without burning my house down.

Good thing I had a broom and a dust pan, because who doesn't like frantically trying to sweep a carpet?