Funky Cat Studio

Current Mood: rushed & silly

Haha… typeo’d that as “love” instead of “live” but maybe that’s true too.

Anyway:

pay attention to us:
300,000 bodies.

terrorist, the
new word
i didn’t know about
all these years.

I wrote that after watching a show on History channel the other day when I just decided to brain-out in front of the TV for a few hours.  Technically the original version was LOST due to BasKet weirding out on me, also lost a haiku that was prolly my best ever.  Hell if I remember that one though.

But anyway.  Back to whatever point I’m trying to come up with:

I was watching a show on History channel that was about Saddam Hussein (I’ll check spelling on that later).  Interesting stuff.  Very interesting stuff.

I don’t watch much TV.  Usually when I do its a little bit of cartoons.  We have a million DVDs so we watch a lot of movies.  I get my House fix from Hulu and watch Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia there also.

So basically I live in a world of fiction.  And I have been for awhile.  I won’t look at the news or newspaper, I rarely talk to people ‘cept on the internet and that’s pretty much a bit fiction too, right? Unless we’re talking hard n heavy real stuffs…

So this show was absolutely fascinating to me.  It had footage of real life, of people doing very real things… even if the commentary wasn’t all real (you have to admit there’s biased shows out there and hey, everything is paraphrased for time).

So today’s lesson is in today’s title.

On a somewhat related note, Mollie and Jay came home with a million tons of cookie dough (chocolate chip, peanut better and sugar).  Its for a cookie bake fund raiser thing for the American Legion.  No, I’m not a Legionair though Mollie’s tried to get me to join.  Mollie just gets herself into these things and apparently I don’t have anything to do with my time.

I like it though.  I haven’t done anything other than sitting on my ass for a long time.  This is part of life (not taking up the slack, but helping others).  I have no clue what they do with the money raised for this but as long as its not testing lipstick on kittens I think I’ll sleep easy tonight.

Or not… because if all goes well I’ll be in Eugene tomorrow afternoonish! So as soon as I finish some messages and blogging and wasting my time relaxing I’ll start packing.  I have 15 minutes between batches.  Its been fun running around.

Its a science now (not that I am any way shape or form like Zyra, who comes up with her methodical methods of getting things done…. not at all lol).

1 Person Assembly Line Cookie Baking:

1. I have 2 cookie sheets.  I fill them up with cookie balls while the oven sits hot ‘n empty.  I don’t like that but 2 sheets at once seems to be “faster.”
2. Stick ‘em in the oven at the same time.  Wait 15ish minutes.  Give your back a break.
3. Take them out and spread on 2 “cooling” racks and a couple extra cookies on my current “stacking rack”. (they’re just plastic trays).
4. Go back to making cookie balls while hot cookies cool.
5. Get those in the oven.
6. Get back to the previously hot cookies, stack/line up 12 in a row on “stacking rack”.
7. Start all over.

And that’s how you do assembly line cooking ^-^ Its like a 20ish minute cycle.

Yes there’s a method.  No I don’t freak out when I mess up my method.  That’s so Zyra… NOT me! I swear!

…. luckily nobody was here when I messed up …

Ohh this post is filled with all sorts of fun words.  I can’t wait to see my blog search result stats on this one ;-)

*ETA* I totally brained-out on everything last night and got Neverwinter Nights working last night.  Anyone wanna play wif me?

Current Mood: determined

Clicky clicky and you get nifty spiffy!

Anyway.  I installed KDE the other day in an attempt to see if any of those writing programs worked any better.  I switched to it a bit ago to give BasKet Notes another chance.  I love my fuzzy clock ^-^  I’m really a Gnome kind of gal though.

I’m desperate to iron out my novels so I’m gonna use BasKet.

I took a screen shot of what i see when looking at a scene in Chapter 2 of Book 1.  Nope I haven’t put in the other books yet because I don’t want to run over myself -that- badly.

The “sections” are pretty cool.

You have have a window (like when you make a chapter or scene or whatever)  be split in 2 adjustable width columns like I have in this scene here, a single column or “free” mode where you can put little “sections” (like the Characters and Notes sections there) anywhere you want in a very free form, mind mapping way.  You can put down images and other stuffs, too.  You can add background colors or images to like… everything O.o

You can add tags to each of those little sections that’ll change their color and such… so you have To Do, Important, Very Important, etc.  You can create your own tags then search for them.   While I could prolly use the tagging system to my advantage for things like characters, objects and places, its not really intuitive to use it that way.  yWriter was more intuitive for that because… well it was made for novelists while BasKet is not :-p

But yes, this program can get quite fancy.

I may go in there later and create a character and such section thing and have pics/info on all my characters but really that’s why the roomie and I created a blog, so we could share all that with each other.  So I don’t really need to do it.  But knowing that I can… ohh gives me happy little shivers ^-^

Overall, I love this program.  I’ve played with it off and on for other things but never stuck with it because I’m female and we must constantly change our minds, right? :-p  But I do love it.

Only complaint I have, and I mean the -only- complaint is that I keep accidentally messing up the order of the things in the tree menue.  I’ll drag one scene into another by accident.  Then its a bit of a pain to fix.  This is why I started numbering my scenes which is counter-productive.  If I can make those items number themselves (like in Writer’s Cafe) that would RAWK.

…. and yes, I wrote a fake scene with fake characters and fake notes because I’m incredibly overprotective of my writing.  :-(

Current Mood: aggravated & angry & awake.gif

So earlier today I thought I had a program that would work to help me with my writing.  I have a lot of stuff that needs sorting out so I can really work on it all and icon everything out, etc.  I might have to find a solution other than a writing program.  Here’s a bit of overview of what I’ve tried:

yWriter4: Free.  Windows but works with WINE.  I love this program.  Its perfect.  loveitloveitloveit.  But its… not stable (on Ubuntu or otherwise).  And yWriter5 Beta won’t work on Ubuntu.

Writer’s Cafe 2: Commercial. Very neato program with lots of features.  Its an eye sore but it works perfectly on Ubuntu.  My problem is I keep over writing my scenes way too easily. >.< Not good at all.

BasKet: Free.  Works like a dream for Ubuntu ’cause its for Ubuntu.  Its more of an advanced note taking program.  Its pretty neat for various note taknig things (especially my online Witch School notes).  It will do my book/chapter/scene organizing.  Doesn’t have spellcheck >.<  I cean use a tag on each scene so I can keep track of what needs work, moving, etc.  I could live with this program in a pinch.

Power Writer:  Commercial. Eyesore.  clunky.  Not very usable…

StorYBook: Free.  ZOMG awesome program.  AWESOME I TELL YOU! I love it -but-… I can’t use it because it seems to be mainly for notes on a story/novel and thus where you would put a scene… they only allow so many characters.  GOD DAMNIT  >.<  And it works like a dream on Ubuntu because there’s an linux install for it >.<   Ok so maybe I can use it to help sort things out but I need the -whole- picture.  *sigh*

WriteItNow: Commercial, for Windows only.  I would consider letting M$ anally rape me again just so I can get some fucking work done on my novel writing >.<  I have never seen a better program (’sides yWriter).  I can get it to somewhat work under Gnome.  It works a lot better under KDE but still a little tweaky.  Useable though, I think.  It seems to be a graphics problem.  Nobody has said anything about it anywhere on the web it seems.  Triple se ligh >.<  And I think it costs, which is impossible for me right now.

I’ve seen some suggestions for using LaTeX but even more comments against using it because its more of a word processor.

So… arg.  I don’t know what to do.  Guess I could do a combo of Open Office (regular word processor), with BasKet and maybe StorYBook.

Orrrr I can figure out how to do all this on paper.  *twitch*

*ETA* I just spend way too long reorganizing a couple scenes in BasKet just because I twitched a bit and messed everything up.  Not good for twitchy people like me.  Found a similar but less fluffy program called gjots.  You have to tell it you want your notes to move up or down to tree.   *goes back to playing with it*

*ETA again* Okay gjots keeps crashing on me >.< I’m tempted to open a blog or something for this damn thing.

Current Mood: numb

So I volunteered out at Rogue Community College bowl to see Bye Bye Birdie by Rogue Music Theatre. I do this almost every year so I can see the show for free. zmg I want my 3 hours back.

It sucked.

There’s no other way to put it.

I don’t have a problem with the acting, (most of) the singing or the musicians, but: The music sucked, the characters were pretty much non-likable (though that Albert character was funny, the actor who played him was really fun).

Most of all… the story sucked. I get that its satire, which is great but… no. The whole thing just sucked.

There were a lot of funny moments that made it barely watchable though! ^-^

Oh, and Swamp Witch kept me warm (the RCC bowl is outside).

So yeah. Never gonna see that one again.

Current Mood: aggravated

From here.

U.S. President George Bush is urging a strong international stand against the government of Zimbabwe, saying the presidential runoff election scheduled for later this week amounts to a sham. VOA White House correspondent Paula Wolfson has details.

President Bush says the people of Zimbabwe deserve to have their votes count.

…. why, YES, it would be nice to have the people’s votes count.