Weird, geeky dreams.

I had three very odd dreams last night, and they were all architectural. The first was work-related, and was more a fly-through exercise about using Pinax directly rather than developing parallel to it. After a quick analysis of the code this morning, the parallel development will continue. It's a trade-off between upgrading the entire system to Django 1.2, and developing within the 1.1 framework with the tools we already have.

( Talks about S&M, so maybe not work safe. )

Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the room right now for another project, and if I was going to do a woodworking project, this would be way second on my list, after the MAME cabinet I've wanted to make.

The third was Yet Another Software Project, this one mostly in Javascript with limited server-side development. And I'm keeping it to myself.

This is my first full day on decaf.

When will it be okay to write gay villains again?

I was re-reading Diane Wynne Jones The Tough Guide to Fantasyland shortly after reading a forgettable spy novel from the mid 1960's in which the villain was quite fey and enjoyed threatening the hero with sodomy before death and all that.

Jones asserts that many fantasy parties have a gay wizard (paging Lynn Flewelling!), who is always good for a casual footrub and sage advice.

It occurred to me that the whole "gay is villainous" thing swung so far over that the backlash ought to be done by now. All characters who interact with one another, at least romantically, must have a sexuality of some kind, so: when will it be okay to write gay villains again?

I suspect the answer is "never." Heterosexuality is assumed by default. Making a character gay is A Statement, regardless of who's making it, and not some by-the-by characteristic of the villain. You can play this for laughs or seriousness, but it's still tricky water to navigate (he said, mixing his metaphors the way one mixes crisco & j-lube).

I'm diseased.

First Kouryou-chan came home with this headcold two weeks ago, then Omaha caught it. Now I've got it-- run over, sniffly, sneezy, sore throat, and run down. Sudafed (the real stuff) is barely working.

Bleah. I do not need this.

An escaped fragment...

I commented in part one of Reassembling my fragmented mind that the NY Times article "Hooked on Gadgets" was "tragically named," but never explained why.

I own an e-book reader. I've had it since 2002, so I guess I count as a very early adopter. By now, it has thousands of books on it. I have no trouble concentrating on and reading one book at a time on the thing. The idea of leaping into another book instead of the one I'm reading has no appeal to me.

It isn't the content, or the container, it's the network. It is the sense that what's happening now is urgent, important. I've been rewarded with enough frission over the past decades worth of use to have developed bad habits about clicking and reading. I'm sure many of you have as well.

The need to know the news every day is a nervous disorder. The "fierce urgency of now" has "become a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment."