The Book of Screed - October 1st, 2007

Alas, my home Internet's been out since yesterday. So if you've been waiting for an e-mail from me, fear not; it should be forthcoming shortly.

-JM

Well, what cool things have been happening?

-I got my galley proof for my story "Owl and the Queen of Summer", which will be appearing very soon in The Sword Review.

-I got my contributor's copy for my story "Black King, Red Queen", which is appearing right now in the October issue of Aoife's Kiss. The story involves chess and evil wizards. Really, what more does fiction need?

-I finished a new short story, "Newbie", and began a new one, "Sword of Celestial Fire".

-A hobby of mine is collecting computer game soundtracks, and to my delight, I recently figured out how to extract the soundtrack from the data files of "Wing Commander: Prophecy". Why should uncovering the soundtrack from a 10-year-old computer game please me so much? Well, when the game first came out, it also had an accompanying soundtrack CD, which I eagerly bought. Alas, the CD only had music "inspired by" the game, all of it performed by German metal bands of dubious quality. So I'm pleased to have at last obtained the real soundtrack (even if it is only forty minutes long).

-It's been over seven years since Windows Millennium Edition came out. If you've ever spent any time at all working on computers, you know that Windows ME was the single most monumental turd Microsoft has ever produced* (not counting Clippy the Paper Clip, of course). How could Microsoft have produced such a mess of an OS?

This web comic explains it all.

-JM

*It was even worse than Vista. If you can believe such a thing.

(Vista isn't all that bad, really. If you have an adequate machine and know how to set it up properly.)