I've written quite a bit in the last year, and a new project is brewing. That means lots of stories that until now have had only limited exposure to select audiences.

My question now: should I begin to post my old erotic tales here to drum up interest? After all, plans are underway to have a site devoted to my tales in early 2009.

(EDIT: changed to a poll)




Should I republish my older stories from 2007 and earlier here?
Yes
No


Where should I publish my new stories?
Nowhere
On the new site
Just here
Here AND on the new site

Current Mood: curious

Well, I only feel slightly bad. It's not so much that I lost interest as I got all distracted. The main hazard of having Attention Deficit Disorder. I'll get over it, and I think you guys can accept it.

In any case, I've been busy learning how to swordfight. Both "stage" fighting and actual 15th century martial arts. Everything from how to tuck and roll with a two-hander to duelling with machete-like swords called Lange Messer. Rediscovering lost fighting arts that were just as sophisticated as the eastern martial arts.

But my role in the re-enactment troupe is a pacifistic one, namely a monk. An Irish benedictine, to be precise, a "Schottenmönch". Believe it or not, from the 10th to the 15th century, droves of Irish monks lived in what is now Germany and Austria, their abbeys famed for the libraries and the books they copied. That gives me an excuse not to be cloistered as well, as somebody had to carry the copies to the other abbeys.

But now, today, something happened job-wise. I got a call from a headhunter looking for web developers for a company in Munich. Sure, I'd be earning more, but it means having only a weekend marriage. I'm flattered on one hand, but on the other I'm nervous as heck: have I gotten too old to take risks like this? Can I subject my family to this?

I'm going to go to the interview. Who knows what may come of it?

Enough rambling. Time to waste time elsewhere.

I am stealing this from discodoris ...

"What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Here's the twist: add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place."

( The list is just after the cut... )

Sometimes I feel it should be more, but then I realise all of the Hesse and Kafka and similar just isn't on the list. So I feel better.

Tags: baa, books, memes
Current Location: On the sofa
Current Mood: contemplative

So, this is where I talk about the new auto that I am driving.

It basically started when I went to get the ASU done. ASU is short for the emissions test that has to be performed biannually here in Germany, often in conjunction with the safety inspection. My little Opel Corsa failed; the catalytic converter wasn’t working. Now that is not good news, and replacing it would cost 500 Euros minimum. Honestly, the car wasn’t really worth it, so we started to look for alternatives, and I spent half a year actually risking a fine. Me, Mr. Take No Risks.

So I needed a new “pocket rocket”, something small and efficient. My first choice was the Citroën C1, mainly because it is so efficient and so tiny it was almost like driving a motorcycle. I liked it, but my wife was put off by the spartan interior. She favoured the VW Fox, but I just couldn’t warm to it. Finally, we settled on the Fiat Panda, as it had the efficiency I wanted and the carrying capacity we thought we would need from time to time.

Some other also-rans that did not appeal were: the Smart Fortwo (too pricey), the BMW Mini (pricey and not efficient), the Ford Ka (not efficient) and the Renault Twingo (a disappointment).

We even got lucky and got a good trade-in price for our old Corsa, so we closed the deal. And now, three months later, I am driving the little Panda and I don’t regret the choice. Well, I do wish I had gotten the Fiat 500, as those little buggers are sexy.

Oh, the new car already has two nicknames. I call it “Gino”, but because it has ES in the license plate, my wife has started calling it “Eselchen” (Donkey).

Current Location: Going to bed
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: The cat snoring

Well, after such a long silence, where to begin?

First things first: I’m still alive, nothing all that dramatic was keeping me away from updating other than procrastination. Instead, it was a slew of other things occupying my time. Work, discovering Facebook, the death of a friend, chatting with a different dear friend, a trip, a new car, getting involved in politics…

Er…

OK, quite a lot has happened. So much that I may forget some things, keep other things private, and focus too much on trivialities. But that’s always the risk we take. The main thing is that I’m writing again.

So, where to start?

Tags: intro
Current Mood: indescribable

No, I didn’t read it. I read a few of the books aloud in German to my daughter a couple of years ago as a bedtime story, but I tag-teamed with my wife and never bothered to read the passages my wife or my daughter read, and only fulfilled my duty as a papa. For some reason it didn’t grip my imagination like Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman did. So I stuck to reading mere synopses, since my attempts to read the original English left me thinking Ms. Rowling was a pretty mediocre writer that owed a lot to her German translator for making the prose better.

But something about the last novel hit me, an idea that the author probably never thought about herself. She could have pushed the stories back into 1981-1988, and dropped hints about how the mundane and the magical were intertwined, how the paranoia and rivalries between Russian, Oriental and European traditions created both the Cold war as well as the Death Eaters and Voldemort. The struggle in the books could then be cleverly interwoven with historical events like Chernobyl or Lockerbie. I suspect, however, that Ms. Rowling wanted to make her stories “timeless”, which only very few authors can pull off and I doubt her writing is good enough to achieve.

Another thing that hit me was that for all the gaudy magic of the wizard world, they were being outpaced and outmoded by the muggles. (“A moving pictures newspaper? Big deal, I got that on my smartphone.”) In the events that I saw, those powers of rapid transport, healing and communication were already starting to fall behind technology, and the HP magical society seems static in many ways, only reluctantly adapting new ideas. In many ways, it was calcified, dedicated to resisting change and never questioning authority.

Which brings me to the final point, my personal definition of what is the difference between magic and science:

MAGIC is secret knowledge, carefully hoarded. Once the secret is known, it loses power. The less people understand about how it’s done, the more powerful it becomes.

SCIENCE is shared knowledge, and grows in power when shared. By sharing, it expands and creates new ideas, and increases the understanding of all.

Tags: books, philosophy, ruminations
Current Location: Sitting at work, nursing a cold
Current Mood: blah
Current Music: Thriller Jazz playlist on my iPod

Note: I mapped some of the details here...

Impression number one: Parking

The traffic and parking isn't nearly as horrid as I expected. We were able to find free parking on the "Strasse des 17. Juni", and walked from there to the Sony Center on Potsdamer Platz. An interesting little walk through the park in the heart of Berlin. After a short restroom break, we continued onwards to...

Impression number two: The Holocaust memorial

It was well done. Tasteful. Sobering without being a full mallet-over-the-head cenotaph, but an attempt to make oppression visual in an abstract form. The monoliths that make up the field are grey, faceless, and start off low only to rise in the middle to overshadow the visitor. The ground is uneven, and it was possible to feel the intended unease. Under the field, there was an information centre that attempted to put names and faces of those murdered. I personally thought it did a good job.

Impression number three: The "government quarter" of Berlin.

Well, that wasn't really a new impression, but the last time I saw the buildings there was snow on the ground. But I enjoyed seeing the people walking around, the relaxed way cars were allowed to drive by the Reichstagsgebäude, and even found the line demarcating the old Berlin Wall interesting. The Brandenburger Tor was where some altercation occurred, as a stranger accosted some of the girls with verbal abuse. I didn't witness this, though, only the girls complaining about the man. The man in question was already walking in a different direction, apparently muttering under his breath. A muttering nutter.

Impression number four: shopping in Berlin

Actually, not much of an impression. I went and hid in a Hugendubel bookstore until it was time to go to the musical and for me to go to meet...

Impression number five: Anelej

At first I didn’t recognise her, as her self-description was "chubby little ball with glasses". I now wish I had taken a picture to show you how misleading that is. She isn't at all chubby, but has a very natural shape. Attractive in a slightly cherubic way, I guess you could say, an effect that is accented by her constant smile. If it wasn't for an SMS telling me what she would be wearing, I would not have recognised her.

Lena is a smart, witty person who I enjoyed listening to. She had a good mixture of geeky charm and a Woody Allen-like self-depreciating humour who made me feel like the klutz. She ordered extra napkins because (she claimed) she always made a mess eating ice cream, but to my chagrin I was the one making tiny spills on the tabletop, much more the slob than she supposedly was.

Now, for all this talk of having dinner and how attractive Lena is, I need to point out that this wasn't a date. Gender played no part in my thinking, except that at one time I caught myself staring at the tiny red shells that made up her necklace, fascinated and wondering if they were shells or fossils or even carved, and suddenly realised that I might be misinterpreted as looking at her...well...you get the idea. If this were a comparison, I would say she outclasses me. She's trilingual, whereas I'm only bilingual with enough French and Italian to fake my way but not hold real discussions. As a little example, as we were walking past the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, some man came up and said something like "Bon soir", and I rattled off "Je suis désolée; je ne parlais pas Français" as we made our escape. She giggled, and the poor guy simply stood there confused.

But Lena speaks fluent Russian as well as German and English. I have trouble with Cryllic, let a lone understand a Slavic language. There just aren't enough cognates for me to grasp, making all work I do for the Polish, Czech and Croatian subsidiaries an act of faith.

So we talked about this and that, agreed that Tom Holt starts off well but the endings of his books are often a car wreck, how Norrington was another example of where PotC:DMC went wrong, all of the other sins the movies committed by mixing elements from the 17th to the 19th centuries, the genius of Terry Pratchett and so on until my wife called, and it was time to say goodbye.

Fazit

All in all, it was very enjoyable. I hope Lena can come to visit, or that I will be able to meet her again next time I visit Berlin.

Tags: berlin, friends, travel
Current Location: Oberkotzau
Current Mood: content
Current Music: Die Toten Hosen - Unsterblich

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Tags: memes
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Chicane

I'm more of a highwayman, a gentleman bandit, but what the heck...

Current Location: Hiding behind the bushes
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Herbie Hancock - Cantaloupe Island

There’s a strategy that I’ve been seeing recently, a sort of ad hominem attack upon critics of the Cheney/Bush administration. Whenever something goes wrong, invent an absurd opposing view, ascribe it to those dirty fucking hippies who are against you, and lie like hell. Just like the myth of protesters spitting on Vietnam veterans (psst…a huge part of the Vietnam protesters were veterans!), imaginary stories are being spread about how evil and scummy and downright disrespectful those dirty fucking hippies are to our Heroic Men and Women in Uniform™. It’s the Dolchstosslegende all over again, the power-hungry idiots blaming their own fucked up, ill-advised misadventure on somebody, anybody, but heaven forbid they admit that they were wrong!

It makes me mad. It riles me to see the smug ivory-tower pundits and Republican marketing wonks pretend they were right, and that the only problem is that we dare to question their authority. Reading the latest whiny pass-the-buck tirade from Kurt Anderson made me fume, but Tristero over at Hullabaloo says it much better than I do. Read it here.

Current Mood: aggravated