• 00:13 Posted my review of Avatar. (No, not the one with the airbender.) tl;dr, story weak, fun high. tinyurl.com/yc4gtvd #
• 14:35 Woot! Just beat Ordrak in Torchlight. Devouring Trap + Arrowhail Spam + Mana/Health Drain Pistols + Potion Spam + Repeat = WIN. #

• 01:56 AGH. My life-draining pistol in Torchlight? I accidentally disenchanted it. There goes most of my strategy. Time to scrounge... #
• 02:07 ...and ten minutes later I find a unique pistol that'll replace my old one. Excellent. #
• 12:10 You gotta be kidding me. Torchlight's on sale for $5. Keiko, sooo sorry I pleaded to get it early. Coulda saved you money. ;_; ! #
• 15:28 Hurrah! After some firewall wrangling, we've got iTunes talking to each other across the home network. I can listen to Jen's tracks, etc. #
• 00:01 Just finished writing up an episode list / quality guide for Batman:TAS for a friend. Rated them by awesomeness / continuity. #

I have a contract that I’m working on that requires I work with rails.  That, in itself, isn’t so bad.  But I think what bothers me most about rails can be summed up in one word: partials. For example, let’s say I have the following:

render :partial => 'employee', :collection => @employees

What this means is that the files _employee.rhtml, using the internal variable employee, will iterate multiple times over the collection employees. The “magic” here is that the internal variable and the partial name coincide. This is called, in rails, using convention over configuration.  And while it makes perfect sense, it is in some sense straitjacketing.  Yes, I know, people will tell me that the internal variable name can be changed with the :as symbol; that’s not the point.  Ruby is such a malleable language that rails almost seems anathemic to ruby in the first place: why use what is just about the most flexible language in the first place, and then create a set of conventions which must be memorized in order to make the thing go?

I kinda like ruby and rails, but they don’t seem to belong to one another.   It feels very much like a marriage with a mail-order bride.

Insanely prolific blogger and book reviewer James Nicoll has a contest entitled Because My Tears Are Delicious To You. James has a lack of patience for exceptionally bad SF, along with a notoriously long idiosyncratic list of things in SF that especially set him off, and is challenging people to write the ultimate “make James cry” opening sentence. (Really, don’t participate unless you know what makes James cry.)

I wanted to participate– some of them are real groaners.  Much to my frustration, I found that I couldn’t.

Here’s the real truth: I haven’t written anything new since April.  Mostly, that’s because, as I wrote in my previous post, people pay me more to write code these days.  But there seems to be something else going on.  I’m not sure entirely what it is, but it bugs me.  I sit down to write and nothing comes to the fingers.  I do what I’m supposed to do when that happens: I write anyway.  I write crap.  And I mean, real crap. (Okay, some of you might actually want to read a scene involving Wish, a Sterling Y, and a bit of llerkin nobility, but the dialogue there sucks, people)

And many of the novel ideas I had to work with just seem to be equally dead.  A retelling of the Superman story as STL warfare between back-to-the-soil types and posthumans?  Completely hung up on the “just another Anglo writer” complex.  Moon Sun Dragons?  Not enough ideas for a book, not enough eyeball kick for a movie.  Caprice Starr?  Boring.  Automatic Sweetheart?  “Steampunk is so last year.”  The Last Year of the Cat?  “Nobody will ever take catgirls seriously, no matter how much Sarah Waters, Camille Paglia, and Bram Dysktra you throw in there.”  Janae?  “Too obvious.”

Bleah.  Someone find me my mojo, ne?

The other day, I was reading one of my own Journal Entries, trying to remind myself of why I wrote them and get back into the groove of writing them again.  Now that I’m doing freelance work, though, I don’t have as much time to write as I used to.  I have to produce value, and people pay me more to write code than stories so, well, there you go.

But as I was reading, the love scene started and the characters got into positions and suddenly it turns out, completely unremarked-upon before this, that the woman in the story is black.  I was at first annoyed by this revelation: how did the idiot author let the story get this far along before dropping this little bombshell?  And then I recalled, annoying myself further, that that had been part of the point of the damn series.  Bombshells like that were the fun stuff of the Journal Entries.   I had enjoyed tweaking the audience by doing exactly that: dropping in details that the characters themselves wouldn’t have cared about until it mattered, not bothering to announce the color of another character’s skin as an identifier but rather as a source of pleasure, an aesthetic quality independent of personality, or culture, or expectation.  I was pleased to note that the trick had worked.

Then I became further annoyed with myself for feeling tweaked by my previous self.  I wonder what other annoyances I’ll have to grind away at in the future, to get back to my former egalitarian gorgeous self?