Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I think I’ve partly fixed the Opera 7 problem now - the tabs are in the right place, but the title is too high. [I spoke too soon - my Opera fix broke IE, so it’s been unfixed.] [Now it should be fixed, though IE6 and Safari have yet to be tested.]

While I was at it, I fixed my links to the Sev Wide Web. They used to serve rotating Bluffy, Sev Trek and contest cartoons. They don’t seem to do that any more but the list of Sev Space themes is always growing: check out Sevmen, The Sevtrix, Sevgate, Fraud of the Rings, The Sev Files, Sev Wars and Hairy Plopper.

I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading to the latest MovableType version. This is a test post. The new, tabby site design will be up later tonight. If I extend the tab style to the blog, the styleswitcher may be turned off or moved to a demo blog.

The first test was a failure, since I forgot that the path to perl is nonstandard on Freeshell. This should work, though.

Rob Morris issued the following challenge on ASC:

From: brightfame66@… (Rob Morris)
Newsgroups: alt.startrek.creative
Subject: TOS Challenge : The Empty Shell
Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 06:29:47 -0400 (EDT)

In this challenge, the writer will try and answer the question : Just
what did the Enterprise and/or Starfleet do with The Doomsday
Machine/Planet Killer after it was deactivated? Be serious, have fun, or
both, or neither. :)

I changed the conditions of the challenge a bit and responded with a series of drabbles from all five Trek series. They begin with The Full Shell, an ENT drabble. The others are linked from there.

Cool site of the day: David Lanham

I’ve added I Will Revive to the TOS page. For those who claim not to know the song, the alien version should refresh your memory. (Speaking of Khan filk, I was surprised to learn that Temperature of Revenge is actually a filk of another filk, “Temper of Revenge.”)

While out filking, I downloaded a list of all the 1 to 1.5 syllable words in English. Apparently, linguists consider a terminal er, le and certain other word endings to be half a syllable. Linguists are clearly not filkers. So with the magic of Emacs, I cut out all the 1.5 syllable words to make a list of the true one-syllable words. If you want to print them out, take the paper-saving version instead.

I’ve also added the ASC Awards 2002 results to the other years listed on the links page. I won some of them: first place in VOY Featuring Seven of Nine and third in Best Story for “The Lamne’rau,” all three VOY filk awards (”Janeway: The Musical!” “I’ve Grown Accustomed to the Phage,” and “The Sound of Sickbay”), first in VOY Crew for “Beta Energy,” second in VOY Single Person for “What’s Left of Her,” third for VOY Author, and third for Best Author. It’s the third-place awards that surprised me the most - last year I wasn’t the multi-series author I am today (Khaaaaaannnnnnn!), so I didn’t expect any of the Overall awards. Also I didn’t write all that much besides filk, but it was a slow year in general, it seems.

Congratulations to everyone who won this year, especially Rabble Rouser (Best Story), Djinn (Best Author, TOS Author), Rocky (VOY Author), Seema (DS9 Author), Lori (TNG Author), nostalgia (ENT Author, New Author), and Ventura33 (MIS Author). Thanks to everyone who commented - every comment is appreciated.

I’ve added a TOS section to the website to house my two Khan filks and my collection of Khan links. (For legal reasons, the Khan image collection is not on-line, though I may eventually link more good Khanage.) I managed to track down the STII movie trailer and some helpful reviews of The Eugenics Wars.

This is my first site update since the awards season started, but not the last of the Khan. His is the superior ficcability.

Using dive into mark’s RSS 2.0 template for MovableType, I’ve added a feed with the full entries:

During my unplanned week of not blogging, my apartment got cleaner and cleaner and I got further and further behind on the blogables. Here’s my current backblog list:

• The Columbia, of course
• The final installment of MBTI Theater
• Reviews of Between the Rivers and Looking Backwards

That’s not as many as I thought. I may even catch up soon.

I have two new stories up, thanks to last Friday’s ASC Awards deadline. Up until now they’ve been available at my revived mirror at Crosswinds. The redirector is still pointing there because some people can’t reach Freeshell at the moment due to old DNS. Note that the mirror at Prohosting is no longer supported - the stories below are not there.

What’s Left of Her (30k) is an alternate, more realistic ending to “Unimatrix Zero,” starring the EMH. It was supposed to star Tom Paris, for Seema’s sake, but it didn’t quite work out that way.

The Lamne’rau (24k) is about Seven’s brief childhood, as glimpsed in “Dark Frontier,” “The Raven,” “Author, Author” and other episodes. This is the first story in the forthcoming “Tertiary” series (the long-promised Seven Saga). The Tertiary index page also has a list of all my Seven and Borg stories.

On the Mac front, the new iMacs came out yesterday. Once I have one, I think I’ll go shopping for SG-1 DVD’s and get myself a new, less depressing fandom.

After being summarily evicted from its colocation and wandering the streets of Seattle homeless for a week, Freeshell is back in action. Our troubles even made the news at slashdot.

I have to admit, my apartment is cleaner than it’s been in months.

Prohosting sent me a reminder invoice today, so I edited my main pages there to warn people away. I’ve also put more of the site back up at Crosswinds, which, for lack of a faster alternative, will be my new mirror. They still have popups, but anyone who doesn’t have a popup blocker by now is just asking for popups.

I’ve taken the occasion to fix a few typos and add two more songs to the originals page for my filks. Everything should be up-to-date in a few minutes. Not bad, considering the food poisoning - that’s the last time I keep leftovers in the fridge at work.

Useful link of the day: 3D Tutorials for Bryce

I wrote a J/C fic! No one is more surprised than I am. Honey-Dew was a birthday present for Jade. Also officially up on the Voyager fic pages are the filks that have passed through the blog recently, The Sound of Sickbay and The Borg Queen, as well as the one-page edition of The ChetSev Series, the ending of which is new.

Now the muse can get back to her proper material, J/P and the Borg.