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I wonder if the other kids ever called him “sissy-mouth”

Here is something special.

No, it’s not porn.* What it is is amazing. I’ve sifted through half-a-dozen dozen tracks to assemble a reasonable album of Cambodia’s own Buddy Holly, Sinn Sisamouth. He is, to my understanding, perhaps the most well-known Cambodian pop musician, and representative of the swinging cultural era just before Pol Pot came into power and killed everyone. Including, eventually, Mr Sisamouth.

The quality is… shall we say variable, as is the volume level. That may only add to the charm, however.

In a bizarre bit of parallel development, Brandon Sheffield got turned onto 1960s Cambodian music at about the same time I did, through his own unrelated means. Not exactly the most obvious of tunnels to explore, so that was interesting company to find. And as with I, he had been largely ignorant of the Killing Fields, except as a movie title, until the music led him there. Yay, American education.

I’ve tested this compilation out in the coffee house around the corner, and it seemed to go over well, aside from the volume twiddling. Furthermore, James Harvey likes it. So that should tell you all you need to know.

*: My keyboard needs replacing; it only occasionally registers when I hit ctrl-c. So when I paste URLs, I have to be very careful that the URL I’m pasting is the URL I intended. I’ve been amazing a couple of my friends with increasingly embarrassing links, to the extent that I feel inclined to take a break from IM clients for a while…

EDIT: And if you like that album, here‘s a slightly less excellent yet still good follow-up.

(January 30th, 2009 @ 5:54am)



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Particulate Projection

As I sat down, I sneezed. When I opened my eyes, the screen had turned to a starfield.

(January 23rd, 2009 @ 6:23pm)



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Spamaray

I wish everything came in amaray DVD cases. Except for those things that come in digipaks.

I’d want sandwiches to come in amaray cases. So I could neatly stack them in the fridge.

(January 16th, 2009 @ 4:57pm)



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In which procrastination occurs

I’m hopeless. I need to finish this article, and I can’t figure out how to say what I want to say. This is nothing new; I suck at this. Or rather, I keep making things impossible for myself. Why do I keep setting the bar so high?

So, in frustration, the mind drifts.

There have been many of these fan trailers; despite the mixed aspect ratio and tacky font problems, this is the best. It seems to have a complex arc to it, that makes some real narrative sense. Here follows some interpretation, to jog my brain up to speed for more important tasks.

I guess McGann’s Doctor would be involved in the diplomatic part of the story (as far as that might go)? As long as Davros is there to talk and entreat, perhaps there’s some ill-judged hope of avoiding an all-out battle. Perhaps because he specifically blamed the Doctor for the destruction of Skaro, he took this as more of a personal vendetta. Whereas presumably the other Dalek leaders were more interested in the power to be found on Gallifrey.

Then something awkward happened (Perhaps treachery from an impatient Supreme with a back-up plan? Maybe a stupid mistake?) and Davros was taken out of the picture. The Doctor was aghast, because Davros was basically all that was holding back the Dalek army. With him gone, the talking was over and they were just going to get on with it. Which they immediately went and did, with a small invasion force to exterminate the high council.

So the Doctor tried to rush back to Gallifrey and help, but didn’t get too far. Simultaneously leaderless and (presumably) heroless, some mid-level Time Lords freaked out and thought, hey, one rogue is as good as another — that Master is a tough cookie! We never liked that Doctor fellow anyway. What have we got to lose?

So they put all their hope in him, and… he ran off. Which left a gaping hole for the Daleks to pour in.

Perhaps in his attempts to return, the Doctor fought a number of incidental battles, protecting whatever he stumbled across, putting the innocent worlds above his own. So by the time he got back to Gallifrey, it was too late. There was little left to save. So he, what, caused the Eye of Harmony to go supernova, lest it be used improperly?

That would be the most logical conclusion. The Eye is what makes the Time Lords lords of time. That would be what the Daleks would want. It is a collapsed star. If it were to fall into the wrongest possible hands, the most obvious thing to do would be to blow it up. Which presumably would destroy pretty much anything within that star system — Time Lords and Daleks alike. As the Doctor said, Gallifrey burned. Both sides gone, in an instant. And as established in “Boom Town” and “Utopia”, the TARDIS no longer runs on power from the Eye…

…

Why is it every time I write I feel like I’m dying?

Ugh. Well, I’ve got the basic structure of what I want to do, and I know what tangents to avoid. I just can’t seem to think straight. Maybe a nap?

(January 16th, 2009 @ 4:35am)



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Orthogonal Pareidolia

I’ve a horrible record at remembering labels. Proper names especially, and nouns more generally. Most broadly, classifiers of any sort. Which is part of why I’m so bad at languages, despite learning the grammar and pronunciation almost immediately. When it comes to vocabulary, it’s like I’m tacking weak post-its over everything, and every time I turn they blow away. This probably also feeds into my trouble with mathematics (despite again understanding the concepts), and my inability to remember my phone number.

It always trips me up; I expect the words to be there, and then am unprepared when they’re not. I search for synonyms, and find that whole part of my lexicon misplaced. When this happens for every third word, conversations with me can become rather tiresome. I suppose I should just start coining my own words; it would save me such anxiety.

To assuage some of the botherment, I keep a file on my desktop of words that I keep forgetting. (The filename is “words you keep forgetting.txt”.) Many of them are absurdly common, and I use them almost every day to describe some of my favorite concepts — but when I reach for them, they’re just not there. Words like catharsis, exposition, disregard, catalyst, and paraphrase. Others — prosopopeia, dysphemism, moiety, breviloquence — are a bit more specialized. I can probably get away with not remembering those when I need them.

Why, therefore, it has taken me until today to start a file on fantastic names, I don’t know. Potential titles, character names, and band names — the sorts of things that come up all the time, then disappear into the vapor. At the moment all I’ve got is a phrase I found nestled in my head when I woke today: Airtight Harem. The actual words were Airtight Harlem, which is also good, but I meant the former.

(Airtight Heirloom isn’t quite as good. Too obvious.)

(January 11th, 2009 @ 6:46pm)



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