nutella and novella

i have officially written 50,000 words of a novella in november, thus "winning" the nanowrimo challenge.

i did not finish the story, though. 50,000 words have gotten me to the cusp of the climax, but i'll need another 10k-20k to decently finish the thing up. and i shall do so, to see where else the story takes me.

that, though, i can do at a slower pace. now i'm gonna take a break. last night erin suggested that i eat nutella while writing my novella. i think i shall reward myself with some serious nutella indulgence now.

Animator v. Animation

Well, wow. These animations are some of the coolest, funniest I've ever seen, and so I must share them with you. Both require Flash to view, so if you don't have Flash, get it here.

First, we have Animator v. Animation, in which an animated stick figure romps through his hapless animator's Flash design interface.

Then, the sequel: Animator v. Animation II, in which the gloves come off and the rest of the computer gets involved.

I'm so very happy that people are this creative and cool.

naps

i really need my daily nap. every time i skip, thinking i'll be okay if i have some caffeine, i end up a total blob for the rest of the workday.

somehow i kind of wake up once i get home, though. hmmm.

for now: bloblike.

geeking out

Today is a Woot-off. If you don't know what that is, basically this site sells overstocked gadgets on the cheap and you have to buy them before they run out. Everything from wireless routers to "bags of random crap."

Mmmmm, Woot-off. Gadgets. Yum. It seems that the last few weeks I've been exercising my geek muscles more and more, at home and at work. I honestly think 1/3 of my time at work lately has been spent doing tech support stuff -- we have about 20 employees and our "IT person" is a guy who comes in one evening a week, if that. So all the day-to-day stuff means someone crying "Alanna heelllllp meeeee!" ... and there seems to be a good deal of that lately. Partly because IE7 really amounts to: "Hey let's make a bad, buggy version of Firefox and release it as a high-priority Windows Update!"

Sigh. Anyway, the techie stuff is more fun than the part of my job I was hired to do. But they should so be paying me more.

bird got the squirrel.

yesterday, at city and presidential avenues in philadelphia, i saw a large bird of prey swoop down to the grassy median of city ave (aka route 1), grab a squirrel in its talons, and fly off with a loud cry.

i wish i could say what kind of bird it was. it was a big one and moving fast. it looked for all the world like an owl from behind, but it was the middle of the afternoon and i would guess an owl would not be hunting at 3pm... on busy route 1, no less. whatever it was must have come from nearby fairmount park.

the squirrel was probably even more surprised than i was.

huh?

please tell me that the new zealand equivalent of april fool's day is today. otherwise, there is no way for me to comprehend this.

10,162.

10,162. The last 3500 or so words were all tonight, fueled by pumpkin bread with Double Rainbow French Vanilla ice cream (oh yumminess unspeakable!). I had to catch up tonight, since I got no writing done during the busy weekend.

My setup is this: my laptop atop a pillow on the upturned crate that I use as a coffeetable. Wireless keyboard on my crosslegged lap. To my right on the futon is my atlas, spread open to the South Pacific (pages 138 and 139). My mouse is covering most of Australia right now.

I am writing about a tiny island in Melanesia that does not exist, or it does exist, or it exists as a person but not as an island, or as an island but not as a person, or... well, maybe I’ll know by the end. Maybe not.

holy glass dust batman!

this is impressive. be sure to check out the other "will it blend" objects in the sidebar. get me some cochicken pronto! in other news, my novella has reached 4,478 words.

2,076

2,076 words so far. not bad for the first day... a bit more than the average of 1,667 per day that i need to complete the task. i think i'll need an average of two hours a day to get it done, which is not as much time as i feared. but i know there are days coming up when i'll not have time to write at all. i had to calm my brain down after my writing session last night so that i could fall asleep.