www.FantasyLibrary.com [Visit Who Is Joseph Teller?] Synthesis & Synchronicity 060

Synthesis & Synchronicity #60

Time Dilation Summary : Ok, for those of you who don't read the Livejournal version of my journal it has been a while (8 days) since I've posted anything to this column. To fill you in, my laptop computer developed serious power supply problems and ended up needing to be sent in for repair. Luckily the repair was covered under the supplemental warranty we had thru Warrentech (via Microtech), unluckily this meant sending the computer half way across the country to be repaired and me being without my machine. Without the machine I could not access the website or do updates, but I Could access Livejournal and make posts online thru the web browser on Cindy's machine. To see all that you may have missed use the livejournal link.

Preparations have begun for what should be a grand adventure (hopefully) next month, when Kiralee and I will be taking a long airplane trip to the West Coast to visit her folks in Seattle. Cindy will be here and watching the house, running a couple of board gaming weekend for the Western Ave Irregulars and generally carrying on with life while we are there. This is my FIRST airplane trip, and will be an 8 hour flight. I'm going primarily because I don't want to be away from Kiralee for such a long time. I also have zero trust in modern aviation, the air traffic control system (I know how overworked the guys and gals in the tower are) and the over hyped security systems. In other words, I'm going into this with internal terrors that will certainly make me a nervous wreck before, after, and during all this.

I have gotten a map and tour book for us as of today, betting on us surviving the trip out to Seattle. If I have anyone here who's reading this who is in the Seattle area, if you can recommend some good Cyber Cafe's (an extinct concept in our own area) it would be appreciated. I'm not risking my newly repaired computer on this flight and will need someplace where I can sit down and get on the net for email and Livejournal etc.

Recent Nifty Movie Watched : Kiralee and I watched Brain De Palma's Femme Fatale Starring Antonio Banderas & Rebecca Romijin-Stamos on a used DVD I picked up. This is a film that missed our radar entirely when it came out in 2002, I can't even remember seeing it listed in the theatres. It's definitely a french-style film, with some wonderful photography, and a twisty little plot that just plain works. It's a thriller action film about a $10 million dollar diamond ripoff and what follows it. It has it's erotic moments, and it's nifty human ones that make it work much better than most American action films (it is not a bomb-a-minute cop buddy film). Our only complaint was that Rebecca Romijin-Stamos can't dance (she can move well, but does not dance well, luckily it's only one short scene in the film).

Book Stuff : I've gone thru a couple of books lately that I cannot recommend for other folks.

A Girl's Guide To Vampires By Katie MacAlister turned out not to be the comedy-horror-romance it was hyped as, but was a pretty much drab romance book set at a goth fair in the Czech Republic. It wasn't funny, it's concepts of vampires and goths were both pathetic and obviously by someone who knows zero about the Goth scene (never mind anything about vampires outside of some really bad movies or some one-shot experience with a White Wolf Vampire Live Action game). The main characters were without redeeming qualities and frankly I was falling asleep after some 100 pages into the book.

Second up is Affirmations For Artists By Eric Maisel. I picked this one up used after hearing about it from someone a while ago, and it wasn't worth the half-cover price I paid for it. The premise was good, but the followthru was less than useful. The author decided that each 'problem' could be solved by about a 3-5 paragraph declaration of what not to do (or what to do in a couple of cases) and a bunch of quotes by various artists, authors, screenwriters etc that often had little to do with the subject of the problem being addressed, or would actually contradict the advice being given.

It gives silly trite advice like telling yourself : "I have a vast amount of work to do. Can an opera come into being without real work? Can a novel? Can I compress the universe into a poem without some struggle? I will work; I must work. I affirm that I will start each day on a work trajectory." Now c'mon, is this any cure for dealing with writer's block? Or how to get yourself into "the mood?". I've seen better advice in fortune cookies and horoscopes.

Anyway, that's about it for the moment.... now I've got to go get caught up on other things.

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