life of yet another weirdo

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I'm currently trying to kick myself out of hiding from everything, including myself. (This is easily done. All you need is something distracting, for example tvtropes.org and enough reading material.)

I'm trying to get back into drawing, because I owe stuff, and just general blah and disappointment with myself. Won't get better if I do nothing at all.

I also think I'm rambling.

At least I got something productive done recently, namely swapping winter and summer clothes from storage to wardrobe. Also helped my mother a bit with relocating books and stuff. We're finally getting a bit of new furniture for the sitting room, replacing the sideboard with a wall unit.

Sometimes, survival was a struggle against nature. Finding shelter from the elements as well as food was essential.
Sometimes, the elements were all on your side, and food was there for the taking.
Nico wondered if it counted as person-against-nature or person-against self when she just could not stomach fruit that called out “Eat me! I’m ripe and juicy!” from its trees.
It was one reason why she disliked places that seemed taken right out of fairy tales.

Originally published at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Tags: fantasy, microfiction, uncategorized, vignettes

The Projektpraktikum which I entered after the signup date is dominated by women, at a rate of two in three, which is very unusual for computer science.

That is, of the five people (me included) who wanted to take part originally, one said they'd drop out, one just didn't show up, and the rest is two women and one man. (Not counting the instructor)...

So, recently I finished re-reading Making Money, the 36th Discworld novel, by Terry Pratchett. I have read all of them, some of them more often than I can remember.

I’m a bit sad that in my mind the best part of Making Money is that the list of Discworld books on the first pages includes those for younger readers as part of the main series, rather than on a separate list. People going “they are children’s books, so they’re not Discworld book” were a kind of pet peeve of mine, while this novel just fell flat, to the point that I took a break to re-read a 50 volume manga series between chapters.

There were a few bits of impressive or funny descriptions, sure, and I did finish it, and maybe it’ll grow on me if I re-read it more often. For now at least, it just doesn’t click.

Mr Bent’s sermon-rants about gold at the start put me off, and the idea (suggested on the backcover an by Moist von Lipwig in the text) that he might be a vampire does not gel from the start, considering that that would be the first vampire not admitting to being one in how long? The entire series?
Gladys, the golem with a crush on her boss, the abrasive Adora Belle Dearhart, Moist’s old associate with the denture troubles, the Leonardo-with-a-narrower-specialisation, the generic slightly mad scientist and interchangable Igor, the utterly pathetic bad guy Cosmo… No-one in this book caught my sympathy or interest, which is sad.

As to Moist, in Going Postal his crazy stunts to revolutionise the mail system were fun to read. In Making Money, the things like breaking into his own office at the start make sense as something to show he doesn’t deal well with routine, but, well, compared to his last book, his later actions seem rather boring, at least if you already have a basic idea of how money works despite not being backed by gold.

What comes to my mind when comparing those two books is how mundane Making Money is. Paper money is something we all are used to. There were some bits of description that tried to create a sense of wonder about how a penny would “turn into different things” depending on what it was exchanged for, but for me it just didn’t work. Money is something practical and lacks the “magic” and personal touch of the written word that, in form of letters, drove Going Postal.
Superficially, the cabinet and the golems added some magic to Making Money, but it seemed rather tacked on rather than integrated into the story.

In summary, Making Money seemed to me mostly like a mix of “let’s write about how money works” and “let’s modernise Ankh-Morpork” with story sprinkled on top, rather than the (admittedly very high) quality of storytelling that I love so about other books in the series.

Originally published at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Tags: discworld, reviews

Tarci and Reena had been as close as sisters, but things had changed. It had started slow, but once it had been known that Tarci was pregnant, Reena started avoiding her. It was hurtful and confusing, but since wondering did not help, Tarci waited for an opportunity when they were alone, and asked.

“Why won’t you talk to me anymore?”

Reena averted her eyes. “I’m sorry, I…” She shook her head. Tarci trembled. She was afraid of them domehow drifting apart entirely, but her old friend reached out and held her hands. “I was afraid of telling you something, of hurting you. That’s why I avoided you.”

“I’m worried now, so you might as well tell.”

Reena sighed deeply. “It is not really my place to – yes, I will tell you, let me finish. It’s not my place to tell you what to do with your life, but, your love… Oh, how can I say this. When I look at him, the spindliness, the long, narrow face, the bright eyes, the way he moves quickly when he moves, but not at all when he stand still… He’s just so weird. Beautiful, but beautiful like a waterbird, not a man.” She must have noticed that it gave Tarci a little sting, and went on, “He’s nice enough to talk to, mostly, and I’m sure you know your mind, and I wish both, all of you happiness.” With a shrug she ended, “I just don’t understand how you could bed an elf.”

This conversation was weird indeed. As the awkward pause caused by Tarci’s attempt to figure out if she was angry grew too long, Reena muttered, “Not my concern, I said.”

Tarci smiled crookedly. “At least we’re talking again.”

Originally published at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Tags: fantasy, microfiction, stories

An article about sexism in a particular job that, funnily enough, leaves as main impression in my mind, "Comedy sucks". It's the last paragraph,

But I have a dream—that one day a late-night writers’ room will be filled with poop jokes and fart jokes and jerking-off-to-Angelina-Jolie’s-face-on-a-magazine jokes, and everyone will laugh, including men and women of all creeds and colors.

Because it was better than thinking of anything else she might complain about regarding being trapped in an abandoned mine with a collapsed entrance, Nico said, “You know what I hate most about this? Not being able to see a thing.”

Her companion did not answer, but there was a brittle little crackling noise, and a faintly glowing, angular object between their thumb and forefinger.

“Oh, thanks. What is that?”

“A piece of my soul.”

“And it… glows.”

“Temporarily. It will last a few hours.”

“Um. And that’s no problem, ripping a bit off your soul?”

Her companion seemed as confused at the question as she was at the whole thing, but after a moment answered, “It will grow back.”

“OK, then.”

Originally published at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Tags: stories

His first impression was that of being hungover. Headache, nausea, and a marked gap in his memories… He was cold an in an awkward position, so he tried to fix that and discovered the handcuffs. As he tried to orient himself, he found that he lay on uneven ground, rocks and pebbles, slick with moisture. The staticky sound he had thought were part of the headaches actually came from outside his head. He was in a dimly lit half-dome, dark rock in his back, arced, white walls that seemed to be moving slightly in themselves in front, as well as another huddled figure who seemed to be watching him. He got a vague impression of a teenage girl in too big men’s clothes, barefoot.

Pushing himself up a little, awkwardly, he croacked, “What… Where?”

“About ten metres downriver from the start of the rapids,” came the reply, matter-of-factly.

It took him a few seconds until he fully understood she meant on the ground of the river. When the realisation hit him, it brought with it some shreds of the day before. There had been a metahuman emergence, some elemental cluster, and things had gone terribly wrong when trying to make contact, and –

“I shot you.” He remembered her face when she was hit. Should have been dead. Then her body had turned to water and, carried by momentum, splattered all over him.

“Yes.” Her cold tone peeled away away some of his shock. He understood an unspoken “you should keep that in mind” in the pause following. “You can make up for that. Tell me where my friends are now.”

He did not even know.

Originally published at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Tags: modern fantasy, stories, super heroes

So yesterday (more or less) my father invited me to take advantage of the group ticket he and two or three other people were getting for the train to go on a shopping trip in Cologne tomodas. So I went, thinking it'd be the usual tromping through bookshops bit.

For a change, I went to the zoo.

It's pretty different from the one in Neuwied. For one thing, it is pretty flat. For another thing, there is far more room, far more species, and all that. Sometimes it's a bit frustrating, when the honking big moat means you can only see the animals in a particular enclosure from Really Far Away, but, eh, 's fun. The parts were without any apparent reason the view was obstructed by

They had capybaras and a tapir and giraffes and elephants and a tiger walked past the little bit of glass wall and tried to sniff the people watching him through it while I was watching and whee!
There were ring-tailed mongoose, which I had never heard of before and which kinda looked like a cross between a weasle and a red panda to me.

There was a flight demonstration. Started with two harris hawks which had been fed a bit too well and therefore took quite a while to be persuaded to go back inside, rather than sitting in a tree, or getting in a fight with another bird of prey through the mesh-ceiling of its enclosure-thing. The saker falcon that followed did a pretty smooth performance.
The next bird did another few extra rounds, and ended up sitting in a tree and staying there, too. I really hadn't expected a kookaburra. XD
They topped off the falconry show with a scarlet macaw. Lovely weirdness.

Weren't the only psittacidae in free flight, though; there were some feral rose-ringed parakeets, too.

I love watching the wild animals that visit zoos uninvited.

Dark Roasted Blend mentions in a post about British Pub Signs:

The Pig and Whistle’s origin is obscure, but it could be a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon “piggin wassail” which means “good health”.

One fun part is that there is a German expression of surprise, “Ich glaub mein Schwein pfeift”, which translates to “I think my pig’s whistling”. As far I could could find out from a quick web search, it dates back to the 1970s or possibly 1960. Variations on the “I think” theme include