Tikatu's Travels Through Time

Yeah, this isn't writing or fandom related but it's important!

Over the past couple of years, Hubby and I have backed a number of different Kickstarters. We backed two collected volumes of a favorite webcomic, Girl Genius, ending up with hardcover versions and a number of cool rewards for our support. Hubby has backed several games, most by his favorite game designer, James Earnest. He tries to choose games we'll play as a family, like Pairs, a new card game. With our shipment on that one, we got three different sets of cards (one with artwork from the Girl Genius artists, Phil and Kaja Foglio) and the extra game, Falling. We're still waiting on our copies of three different games from the Pack O' Games line published by Perplext, but otherwise, we have pretty much everything we backed last year.

Even though Hubby swore he wouldn't back any games this year, two have come up that we both felt we had to have!

Within just a day, I’ve had the pleasure of hauling out my Thunderbirds knowledge (with all the attendant books and other paraphernalia) to help a couple of fellow fanfic writers and personal friends. It was certainly fun, especially all the stuff about Alan Tracy’s educational background. Add to this my posting the first chapter of one of my short stories (Burning Muses) at AO3 and uploading a new post to my RP, and I’m full of Thunderbirds at the moment. It’s given me quite a hunger for fic and for writing or editing what I already have up. I edited the first chapter of Burning Muses, making it tighter. In many respects it was like my edit of the little scene I wrote a few days ago. The changes I made brought forth Brains’s voice and made him less … poetic. (Because if Brains is anything, it is NOT poetic.)

Then, there was the chatter at the dinner table. We went from Gosford Park to Downton Abbey (which we have not seen) to Acorn (which streams Downton Abbey), and then to Netflix – where movies are more plenteous in DVD than in streaming. This led to BBC America (and how we could get it on cable), to other premium cable services, to Game of Thrones and whether or not the TV series matched the novels. That particular thought brought out movies that didn’t match their source material – Boy #2 brought up the Percy Jackson movie (The Lightning Thief). This brought the whole shebang back to … Thunderbirds! The Girl’s comment: “I knew there was another kids movie like that! ” Hubby brought up that Frakes had said in an post-film interview that he directed the movie that the producers wanted, even though he knew the fans would be “annoyed by it” (Hubby’s words, not Frakes’s.) I promptly chimed in. “Annoyed? Annoyed?” Which, of course, is far too mild a term to describe the old guard’s intense hatred of the film.

Maybe if he’d stayed closer to the source material, we’d have had another Thunderbirds movie. After all,  there will be another Percy Jackson film, coming out this year.

Some fandoms get all the luck…

Been working on coding things for my personal fiction site. I’ve finished and posted Mosaic – though that will be updated when the muse strikes – and I’m working on The White Winds. There’s still lots to do, but I’m almost halfway through the chapter formatting. I’ve managed to get it down to a routine. Open the .txt files, put in the chapter coding snippet for each chapter. Scroll down and add the back and forward buttons snippet. Tweak them to the proper chapter numbers. Remove the “next time, next chapter” stuff and paste it in a .txt file. Scroll up; add new title and cut the teasers and disclaimer. Then save as a .shtml file. Leave them all open, find a scene divider and change it with the short horizontal line snippet. Copy that, and do a global replace on all open files. Do a preview skim to make sure things look right, then save and close all. Really, I just did about 15 chapters and it only took an hour or so.

Seriously, the biggest time eater is finding images for the splash pages and writing the foreword. On Mosaic, it took me beyond forever to figure out which screencaps to use (and I found I’d duplicated some from earlier stories), and then the free photos that spoke to the drabbles. For The White Winds, I’ve asked my daughter to update a piece of cast art that she’d done for me earlier. Her artwork has progressed soooo very far that she was embarrassed by the old stuff. Since I’m working so quickly on coding this, I should poke her about that piece.

I’m also trying to decide if I should add my two non-Thunderbirds one-shots to the One Shots book. I’ve done one for The Incredibles, and one for Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. My fanfiction is so heavily Thunderbirds-oriented, but these deserve a home, too. (They are posted on ff.net and on FanNation.) Tell me what you think about that.

In other writing news, I’ve pulled most of my work from Lunaescence Archives. I have several reasons for this. Things that were broken aren’t being fixed is one of them (thinking of forum registration here), but an increasing dissatisfaction with the way the archive is being run, and the ever-stronger skew toward anime and manga (and reader-insert) stories are probably stronger reasons. I’m sad about this, really; so many archives tend to go downhill once their owners are no longer involved in running and upgrading them. And now this has happened (IMHO) to Luna. (Yes, this puts me in mind of Thunderbirds Central, and parts of IR:TNP that need updating, too.)

As far as my personal “cyberstalker” (Lillehafrue’s term) is concerned, I haven’t heard from her again. Hopefully, I never will.

Back to the HTML editor, Batman!

Yeah, for the first time this winter, it's snowing here in SC. We've had rain for the past three days; good steady rain, the kind that soaks deep into the ground and sticks. Today, though some of that rain was mixed with sleet, leaving little grains of ice on our "new" side porch (the old fort from the backyard, almost gutted and moved to the side door). Then it began to mix with snow, and turn over to snow completely around 5 p.m.. So very good to see after such a snowless winter. We've even had thunder with this: thundersnow is pretty rare no matter where you go.

Looks like about an inch so far, with an accumlation of 3 to 6 inches possible by the time the storm pulls out - a least, that's what the weather authorities say. And since this is evening, and the temperature will only go down, it shouldn't melt right away, as it did for my friend from Alabama. She says that her snow is all gone. The kids are looking forward to having a day off from school. It's Hubby's first week of annual leave, so he doesn't have to worry about work at all.

Yikes! Something just hit the roof. The Girl is going out to check, taking Lacey out with her so the dog can do her business - if she will. Sometimes she's a really prissy dog about doing her business in the weather. She's been growling and giving little "woofs" at the kids next door playing in the snow. The noise of whatever it was scared Cotton, who hid under my desk. She has now come out and is watching the snow fall through my door. I offered to let her out, but she took a couple of sniffs and decided that warm and dry was better than cold and wet.

The Girl is back now; says she didn't see anything, even with a flashlight. Things that fall on the roof tend to sound louder than they should. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a clump of mistletoe from our oak tree.

I have to admit, I really miss the snow at times. But the fact that we don't have it very often makes it easier to appreciate when it does arrive.

( picspam! )