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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Casteen's LiveJournal:
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| Friday, November 13th, 2009 | | 11:08 pm |
| | Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 | | 7:57 pm |
movie: Paranormal Activity
This was the scariest movie I've seen in awhile. Part of this is because I don't tend to see movies billed as "horror" (usually more accurately described as "torture porn".) I do enjoy suspense movies, and supernatural horror, and even psychological horror. Slasher movies are something else altogether. Anyway, I enjoyed this movie. It's easy during most movies to distance oneself from what's going on onscreen. In this case, it was much harder, for me anyway. It had some nice surprises and twists. I was jumping and swearing throughout. ( minor spoiler )Anyway, I liked it a lot. And I didn't like Blair Witch, so there's that. | | Monday, November 2nd, 2009 | | 9:53 pm |
| | Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 | | 12:43 am |
Colorful military jacket
I want this, in both red and purple. The blue, and the charcoal stripe are nice, too. 
 (Images are linked to the vendor.) I'm not getting it, yet. I already have a red-on-red stripe long jacket, and a purple long jacket. They're styled differently, though, and don't have much room for layering. Maybe next month. | | Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 | | 7:14 pm |
| | Monday, October 19th, 2009 | | 7:28 pm |
another book concept
You saw it here, first. Leveling Up: A Self-Improvement Book for Gamers. The basic premise would be to apply character creation and development strategy towards oneself. For example, how one spends one's real-life experience points. Warning to rules lawyers: I'm mixing my terminology here. I use various terms interchangeably, rather than sticking to the nomenclature of any one RPG system. Experience points are effectively time. Time spent at work is spent improving (or maintaining) the financial resource pool. It can also be applied towards improving the skills related to one's job, earning new skills, and meeting new contacts. Time spent watching television is most often applied towards trivia or pop culture knowledge, but can also improve one's understanding of history, physics, and other subject material. Time spent at the gym can be applied towards improving strength and endurance, and sometimes charisma (though I tend towards defining charisma as mental/social, rather than physical, conformance towards society's beauty standards helps.) Time spent at the dance or yoga studio, or dojo improves strength, stamina, and agility, as well as skill in those specific disciplines. Time spent online builds those contacts, and can improve knowledge skills. At the very least, one gets good at internet research skills. Frequently, people get stuck in an idea of who they are, and what they can achieve, rather than looking at the possibilities. We all have our flaws, which can make achieving some goals more difficult. Others are possible if we spend the necessary time to build our prerequisite skills and abilities. For example: I have asthma, three disc protrusions in my spine, and very dense bones. There are some things I'm just never going to be good at (running, jumping), although I could certainly get *better* at them than I am now. Whether I am a dilettante, with a lot of different skills, or a specialist, all depends on how I spend my time. The primary caveat is maintenance; once a character has a skill or trait, they have it indefinitely. Characters don't lose strength when they stop going to the gym, nor language abilities when they stop practicing (although maybe they should). People do, and so to maintain a skill requires ongoing investment of real-life experience points (time), although less than was required to obtain the skill or attribute to begin with. Most people just allow themselves to develop whatever skillsets and knowledge comes easiest and most organically. Applying character development strategies to oneself, shifting the way one looks at one's current situation, limitations, and potential, can be a useful tool. For example, I decided that I want to cultivate ambidexterity, and so I'm working on it. I'm going to begin on the book in the next few months, depending on how my self-experimentation turns out.  | | Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 | | 9:40 pm |
le mot du jour
According to freetranslation.com, cheesecake is cheesecake in French and English, both. In Spanish, it is pastel de queso. The "pastel" reminds me of those candies called pastels. Pastel, translated from Spanish to English, is pastel. Cake, translated from English to Spanish, is bizcocho, which is a completely new word to me. Bizcocho, run back through into English, is biscuit. (Okay, I can see that.) Via Yahoo! Answers, I found torta or tarta de queso, which seems to work better. Tarta de queso is confirmed via wordreference.com. Back at freetranslation.com, tarta de queso translates as cake of cheese, so it looks like we have a winner. Et alors, On a dit "le cheesecake" en français. Es llamado "tarta de queso" en español. To those who are more familiar with Spanish, is that last line an accurate translation? I fed it through the online translator. Things rarely translate directly across. | | Sunday, October 11th, 2009 | | 8:14 pm |
Poe's funeral
Today, my mom and I attended the funeral of Edgar Allen Poe. When Poe died 160 years ago, he didn't receive a proper funeral. They decided to give him the funeral he should have had, with the advantage of complete and utter anachronism. There was a procession, a body, an costumed mourners. There was a packed house, with people waiting in line for tickets. NPR was there, covering it for Morning Edition. The speakers at his funeral included actors portraying his contemporaries and peers, as well as those who came after (Whitman, Lovecraft, Doyle, Hitchcock...),and the voice of the narrarator of the Tell-tale Heart. There were also Ellen Datlow and Gris Grimley (the actual people). It was presided over by John Astin, of Addams Family fame. It was a lot of fun, but I left my camera in the car. There are pictures already on flickr, and a couple of people took my photo. If I find it online, I'll link it. | | Thursday, October 8th, 2009 | | 6:28 pm |
the word/phrase of the day
Using freetranslation.com. Random, en français: fait au hasard Back into English, is "does at random". Hasard alone translates as "chance". So, random chance is essentially hazardous. (The translation of "hazard" from English to French is "danger", which means that "danger" is one of those words that works in multiple languages. Danger is one of those words I always thought we should have a universal word for, like "fire" and "shark". The translation of "hazardous" to French is "hasardeux".) I suspect that, as with "joke"*, I'll need to get a more accurate translation of the word "random" from a native speaker. * The language dictionaries I used translated joke as jeu, which means "game". There's another word, which I cannot recall, which actually translates to joke. Which is good, because when you are trying to tell someone that it's a joke, and you say instead that it's a game, that's entirely a different connotation. | | Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 | | 9:00 pm |
| | Monday, October 5th, 2009 | | 8:55 pm |
| | Sunday, September 20th, 2009 | | 11:16 pm |
the Hell?
I just saw a commercial for a local car dealership (Liberty Ford, Randallstown) which had either Jerry Springer, or a very good look-alike, as a spokesperson. Has anyone else noticed him shilling for dealerships? I'm trying to figure out if the dealership decided to up their advertising budget, or if he's started doing more random commercials. | | Sunday, August 9th, 2009 | | 12:58 am |
| | Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 | | 3:56 pm |
| | Saturday, July 25th, 2009 | | 12:30 pm |
| | Monday, July 20th, 2009 | | 9:21 pm |
| | Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | | 10:55 pm |
Boosting the signal
Jim Hines is hosting a charity auction. He's auctioning off an advance copy of The Mermaid's Madness, with proceeds going to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Link below:  | | Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 | | 11:50 pm |
TED talks: Elizabeth Gilbert
Creativity, inspiration, and genius. Interesting stuff. (hat-tip, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) dimethirwen.) For me, my short fiction and poetry arrives whole, and if I don't write it, I miss it. I've written poems on the backs of envelopes while at gas stations, short stories on a series of sticky notes. And when they go, I can't pick them back up again. Probably the reason I've never finished writing a novel, or even novella. I can't keep up. My visual art comes in fits and bursts, and falls into two categories: 1. the work I do as a semi-pro artist, which is conventional, and uninspired. It's like I follow my own personal recipe book. It's not so much art as a skill. (Hey, people like dragons, I like dragons, I'll draw dragons for a convention art show! Yay!) My deviantart gallery is filled with this not-art stuff, as well as some other work. 2. the work I do for myself, which arrives whole in my head, and then I muddle through trying to translate it onto whatever medium, mostly unsuccessfully. If I stop in the middle of it and put it away, I can never finish it, it's simply gone. If I wait to start it, it lives on in my head until I begin. What is your experience of inspiration? | | Monday, July 13th, 2009 | | 10:41 pm |
| | 8:42 pm |
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