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  May 2008
 
The Astonished Head Tee! Buttons, Small and Bigger! Chomskybat Magnet! Proloxil T-shirts and Mugs! 
Ba-Bow Limerence (Falls In Waves) 
Astonished Head: The Ad Miserable Ovoid Creature 
Current Crygender The Hacker Crackdown The Ethics of Ambiguity The New Goddess In the Queue Love and Limerence A General Theory of Love Labyrinth of Desire The Second Sex Decoding Gender in Science Fiction Male Bodies, Women's Souls 
The Aristocrats The Blenster's Blog Classical Values The Colossus Exit Zero Fried Green al-Qaedas Kate Evans' Blog Protein Wisdom Seablogger Spiced Sass Ten Fingers 6 Strings through the moonroof verb-ops Virtual Occoquan Waiting for Cassowary  BMEzine ErosBlog Fleshbot Girl with a one-track mind ModBlog Susie Bright  Adventure Cycling 'BentRider Online crazyguyonabike Greenspeed USA HP Velotechnik Ken Kifer's Bike Pages Nomadic Research Labs Northeast Recumbents 
boingboing Dan's Data Engadget Gizmodo Mozilla Oh Gizmo! OpenOffice Slashdot ThinkGeek Treehugger Ubuntu Ubuntu Forums Wired   
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September 01, 2007
Astonished Head #55
September 07, 2007
Still Here.Just not, y'know, here. And, as proof that I am entirely unnecessary to my own blog, traffic is up. Oh, and to the person who arrived here using the search phrase "frenum piercing head is turning green:" go to the doctor, dumbass. September 12, 2007
Sometimes......I wake up in the night, and, almost lost in the rushing sound of the Holmes air filter next to my bed, I can hear the call of my old modem...dialing in the dark and connecting to phantom boards.
'Kay, I've Got One!A massive yet readable post of unparalleled genius that clearly and concisely explains all kinds of fantastic and wonderful ideas about just why it is that the world is the way it is and why the people in it do what they do plus an extra added bonus bit that ties body modification and deviant sex acts into the resolution of all wars the elimination of disease putting a base on Mars and bringing back the wax cups that Dannon yogurt used to come in because it was better back then and so were Pop Tarts.
For All The New Folks......who are currently flooding in for no apparent reason: this is the part of my writing cycle where I pop up here with infrequent bursts of utter nonsense. For frequent bursts of utter nonsense, hit the Previous Months link over there to your left. And take off your goddamn shoes, I just vacuumed. September 14, 2007
SwoopSo yes, things here in pixel land have been quiet. Quiescent, even. Dullsville. On the plus side: I just cracked 19,000 words on the novel, which works out to a chapter a week, every week, for the past two months. I'm adopting a lean and mean approach to it: character and dialogue. That's it. Oh, and there's plot. But most of that comes out using only those two elements. Once the story is in, I'll go back and put the eyebrows on it. Need to get myself a big old street map of NYC, for example, to build the sense of place up with a few of them there choice details. But for now: I am cranking along, and every week I think, "Will this be the week where it all crashes down and grinds to a halt?" It hasn't happened yet, although there have been some close calls. There was Chapter Five, for example. I wrote that one three times in a week, producing close to six thousand words before I got the 2,000 words that were mostly the right ones. It's a bit like a high wire act, and I do enjoy it. Every time I reach a place and stall, it turns out that what I thought I needed to write wasn't actually what I needed to write, and what ends up happening storywise, though unexpected, is better than what I had planned out. Which means that the end of the book will probably not be the end that I currently have in my brain, but that's fine. I just hope that all the zigs I make match up with the zags and end up creating a story that's engaging and worth a reader's time. I suppose I'll find out, when it's all...finished. Finished! What a concept.
Gosh, I Loves Me The TechMakes me all tingly inside. Like being Tasered. Which is a line I used in an e-mail to friend, and decided was just so smashing I had to use it here too. I'm typing this from my trusty Dell 700m laptop, which is tiny and, apparently, not at all dead the way I thought it was back in July. This, as it happens, is fortunate, because my shiny new Compaq Presario V6000 laptop, all big with its high-tech blue lights and so on, is, in fact, dead. Fatal spasm of the system board, very tragic. Another line from an e-mail that now you too can enjoy! Usually I'm good with the tech. Turns out that the Dell's power jack had not, actually, cracked off its motherboard the way I thought. It was the power adapter that died, the AC-DC one I used with the solar rig while on tour last summer. That's the second one that's had a problem. The first one died after 30 days, and this one lasted a little over a year. I guess that's why Dell only gives them a 90-day warranty, and I'm fortunate that the second adapter didn't die on the road, which would have caused all kinds of interesting problems. At $100 a pop, I can't really recommend them, due to the expense/suck ratio. In any event: I found the stock adapter that came with the Dell in one of my random boxes of crap, plugged it in, and lo! the 700m, she lives. Which, of course, means that I didn't have to plunk down the coin for the new black Compaq which is currently on the couch next to me doing a very convincing impression of a brick. Fortunately, my friend K. is a computer tech, and will be able to grab my recent data off of the drive before I send it back to the factory where they will fix it and, in the process, wipe the drive clean. In a way, though, I'm happy: I really do like the Dell. I'm attached to it, because it was my boon companion across 2,000 miles of the United States, and served me well in forest glades, in my tent, on motel desks, and at the beach. I'm pleased that it's still kicking. September 15, 2007
What Do You Call Software That......upon installation, makes multiple changes to your system without asking? Locks itself down so that those changes cannot be undone? Prevents Windows from uninstalling it using the standard Add/Remove tool? Will not allow itself to be deleted from the hard drive by the person who happens to own said hard drive? Prevents access to FTP sites containing software that will remove it from your system? I don't know about you, but I call it malware. Which is more than a little ironic, because the software in question is Symantec's Norton Internet Security and Norton Anti-virus. I normally use Avast! and Ad-Aware for that sort of thing, but when I got my new (and now defunct) laptop, I foolishly launched the 60-day license for the Norton product. It immediately shut down access to all FTP sites, broke my e-mail program, and a host of other annoying things. Here's the good part: in order to make changes to the default settings, you have to have a centralized Norton "Supervisor" account. You can't get one of those without a product key. And the 60-day license--you guessed it--doesn't provide you with a product key. In the course of trying to get this festering parasitic code off of my drive, I encountered the issues outlined in the first paragraph. Symantec does provide a removal tool, but their product locked me out of their own FTP site. So, I fired up the Mac, downloaded the tool, uploaded it to Astonished Head's server, posted a blog entry with a link to the file (the entry, in its entirety, read "Fuck Symantec"), and downloaded it onto the laptop. I ran it, and it removed the software. This happened eleven days ago. I'm writing about it now because this morning I received a reply from Symantec tech support to my query: "So if I've got a 60-day OEM license, no product key, and no "Supervisor" level account, how do I get this thing off my computer?" Their response? A link to the removal tool on the FTP site, which I wouldn't have been able to access. Let's see...invasive software that is completely nonresponsive to the user, disables key system functions, and is generally a pain in the ass, coupled with tech support that takes over a week to respond with an entirely useless suggestion. Yeah, let me install more Symantec products on my computer. Because I think it needs more SUCK.
Yes!
Why I Like The ClassicsThe Classics, really, tend to be found in increasing number from roughly 1985 on back. And the only porn I actually own on DVD at the moment dates from the 50s, 40s, and 30s. Shalom Auslander has something to say about mod'ren porn, and I don't disagree. Read "Trouble in pornoland" here. [Via Reverse Cowgirl]
TheologySeptember 17, 2007
September 19, 2007
Cake Or DeathSeptember 20, 2007
September 22, 2007
Amazing Jesus!September 23, 2007
More Tuneage!September 27, 2007
Steampunky Goodness!
Hey man. What? Did you hear that? Hear what? That. Listen. ... There it was again. Nope, didn't hear anything. Really? Really. Because it sounded like your skull. What? Your skull. On the floor. CRONCH How about now? *urhk* September 29, 2007
ZOMG DYSTHYMIA LOL!!!11!!
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