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January 18, 2007
Eric Burns-White: Completely random Necropost.
Hey all. This is random because I'm up to my neck right at the moment.
However, for the record? Apple Premium Repair Dispatch has unexpected hold music. Wakefield's "Say You Will" just passed by, and now it's Tori Amos's "A Sorta Fairytale." Which makes for an odd state of mind while you try to find out if your onsite repair service tech is stuck in an ice storm or not.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:06 AM | Comments (24)
January 17, 2007
Eric Burns-White: So, how was *your* weekend?
It's two fifty-six in the afternoon on Tuesday. At 1:14 I watched Wednesday step through the door onto the accessway of her plane to Philadelphia and her Canadian transfer. The Manchester Airport was built to be airy and pleasant and accessible, and the security precautions of the last six years have only moderately changed that. Bulletproof Lexan between me and her didn't blunt my line of sight of her, and cell phones mean being able to talk right up until.
Which is sappy, I realize, but you have to understand. We do this entirely too often. I drive up to Ottawa, we have a great time, and then I have to climb back into my car and drive away, and neither of us really want that. She comes down here, and we settle into a routine that's warm and inviting, satisfying and pleasant. And then she has to leave. That's the part I'm not too fond of.
It was mitigated, of course, by the knowledge that there's just so much longer we have to do this. I asked, she said yes. We're engaged. And that makes a difference.
My friend and panelmate from Arisia, The Ferrett, says I shouldn't call her my fiancee -- and that she shouldn't call me the same. "You might as well just get started calling her your wife," he said. "Since you're getting over calling her your girlfriend anyway. Why relearn the habit after the marriage?" And I can see his point. At the same time, it's actively fun to call her my fiancee right now. It's like trying on a new jacket, and running your hand over the nape of the fabric. At some point you become used to it and then inured to it, but at first it's just cool. Why wouldn't I want that same experience again after the ceremony takes place?
As for when the ceremony takes place -- well, that's a darn good question. We're not looking for a particularly long engagement, but the details aren't really up to us. Despite the fact that we were born less than four hours away from each other by the driving of the automobile... despite the fact that we grew up with the same local television channels, the same cultural referents, the same potato-driven interruptions of the standard calendar and the same freaking weather, we are considered foreign to one another, and our respective governments must process, acknowledge and ultimately approve of our getting married. Until we know what Immigration has to say about our Visa applications (which haven't yet been filed, due to total lack of time since the weekend to do so), we won't know when she'll be let into the country to live with me. And by the nature of the Fiancee Visa, we will then need to get married within 90 days after she has been. That is the rule, and we will abide.
Which probably means a small and nigh-perfunctory civil ceremony, followed by a fully planned out reception et al with invitations and starchy clothes and wedding registries and all the fun that is getting married. And that will be cool, but we can't very well set dates for any of it.
Knowledgeable people who have passed the bar have told us this is the way to go, by the by. It is easier and faster to get the fiancee visa approved than it is to actually get a wife into the country.
(Before someone asks -- yeah, we're looking at her moving here. It makes more sense, given our current employment circumstances. Naturally, if someone reading this wants to give her a Canadian dream job, we will both be pleased and reconsidering our plans. Though it is worth noting we like our domestic circumstance in America.)
Three forty-one, and I've managed to find the thing causing bigass trouble to our RSS feed. I predict a veritable flood of stuff, followed perhaps by another spike of traffic. We're probably moving to Project Wonderful soon, ad-wise (it just makes sense), and it has been noted that we should really have done so back on Thursday or Friday, before the wedding announcement. It has been a mind-numbingly large amount of traffic since then (six figures of pageviews, easily. Which is very, very cool all around). And there is something to be said for that, but... well, on balance I'm glad I didn't. I didn't propose to Weds as part of a ratings stunt or a moneymaking venture, and the amazing people who pitched in and helped out didn't do so to make us money. Better to do the switch when things are settled back to normal, which will happen soon enough. If people bid on our ads based on traffic patterns, they should have accurate information about those traffic patterns.
Some people have asked me about traffic since I came back, it's worth noting. Well, we were up well over 60,000 pageviews a day at our peak. 2006 eroded that significantly, and rightfully so. Since the traffic's gone back up, we've moved to between 20,000 and 30,000 pageviews. I anticipate a moderately slow increase, unlikely to hit the same peaks as the past, ignoring for the moment something like this past weekend. Certainly, the weekend didn't hurt overall traffic, despite my now having to make up essays I missed.
Which brings up one of the amazing sides of all of this. The response to the proposal has been staggering. Weds and I have been downright delighted with the comments and responses and calls of "Dude" and "Merf" and "Woot" all over the web. On Sunday, we sat for a while in an internet cafe, waiting for some friends of hers to join us for fast nosh and squeeing and the like. We did vanity searches and Technorati searches and giggled at comments and acted... well, like a pair of giddy kids who just got engaged in front of the freaking planet. People have been fantastic, and we are really, really touched. And thank you all.
A special thank you should also go to Phil Kahn. Phil agreed at the 11th hour to be the emergency "fill in" guy, just in case one of the last panels couldn't make it. He also penned an 18th panel to go after the whole thing, but I didn't receive it before we went down to Arisia, and the bandwidth and network at Arisia were so spotty I couldn't get it uploaded. I include it here, so you can pretend it followed the Milholland Money Shot Cliffhanger. Phil is a dude.
But so many people are dudes. Not the least of which is Ursula Vernon, who happily provided a new Snarky which I then didn't think to add to the comic either. I include it up above (though viewers of the video broadcast got to see it). Along with all the other artists in question -- the artwork, some black and white, some color, all essentially springing forth from their brains (for the record, my stage directions to everyone were "Eric standing and smiling as he talks," which means every nuance, every reference, every detail and every cool thing in those panels were put in by the artists themselves) was perfect. It brought Weds to tears when she saw it, in a very good way.
Okay, so I cried too. Give me a break -- I'm sentimental.
Everyone I contacted was supportive and happy. (Two never responded, it's worth noting, but I assume that means nothing but that spam filters can be overzealous -- it's happened way too often to me.) Of everyone who did respond, only one artist opted out, and that was schedule based -- he had just way too much stuff to do, but he wished us well.
Another fast note, this time on the ring. One or two people noticed the ring in the Milholland Money Shot Proposal panel had a red stone instead of a white one. Neither Weds nor I are partial to white diamonds (and we both find the "two months salary" thing absurd -- if I'm going to spend enough money for a car or computer on my fiancee, we're going to get a car or a computer), so we went with sentimental and meaningful to us instead of cold.
There was some discussion among my family, by the by, of my using a diamond that had been my grandmother's. So it's not sheer economics that caused us to eschew the thing. We could easily have had full on bling -- and classy bling at that -- had it been the direction we wanted to go in. Weds and I had been talking for some time about 'hypothetical' rings, and that was the guide I followed. The metal is titanium (Weds has some metal reaction issues with jewelry, and besides -- titanium is the geek's platinum when it comes to engagement rings). The central stone is garnet, which is why the ring stone is red. We also have smaller black diamonds on it, which look cool. And in the end, don't you want this thing to look cool?
Which brings up one other thing -- one or two people have asked what would have happened if Weds had wanted to say no, and here I was being so public. Well, the simple fact is, Weds and I had discussed marriage often. I hadn't asked her to marry me, but there was more than a little discussion on the finer points of Immigration Law, rings and "what we should do if we ever got married." I am a firm believer that you shouldn't ask someone to marry you if you're not pretty old certain of their answer to begin with.
Did that mean the proposal was risk free? Of course not. But she said yes and spent the rest of the day... well, weekend... deliriously happy. I conclude it was well done.
We fast forward (in one sense) to ten fourteen p.m. On Wednesday. This is the sort of thing that "just happens." I ran out of power at Panera. I climbed in the car. I drove home. And....
...well, I coped. The apartment is quiet when it's me and the cat. And I was exhausted. The trip, the con, the engagement... everything. I dozed, I talked with Weds on the phone, we tried to get the Slingbox working (by now we've succeeded in that) and then a night's sleep, an ultra-early morning, a day's work and catchup, a four hour theater rehearsal. ("So look out for me! Oh muddy water! Your mysteryyyyyyyyy's both deep and wide!") I got home and crashed again, this time for a couple of hours, easily.
Of course, there was something else to report from work today. See, I had a very... um... public proposal. Which means that someone posted a link on the school's Firstclass server. Which means everyone at the school had seen it.
I've worked here for just shy of nine full years. In that time I've never walked into the dining hall only to have the students applaud. I could get used to that. The cast of the play did the same, later on.
It's nice. It's very nice. And I'm surprised to realize how differently I feel now. My status has changed. I'm an engaged man. A fiance. I have a fiancee of my own. That's stunning.
And it's wonderful.
The massive "makeup posts" start tomorrow. There's lots of stuff to talk about. Lots of strips I thought were cool. Lots of things.
But as for me, for now? I'm tired again. Night, all.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:59 PM | Comments (33)
January 16, 2007
Eric Burns-White: RSS and Atom happier, agree to reconcile with site.
Hey gang. Found what was causing us "trouble" on the ol' website's RSS and Atom feeds. I anticipate RSS readers becoming flooded with posts, momentarily.
In the background, I'm writing, including lots of catchup posts to fill in the missed days. When they go up, I'll post a "current" link to them as well, so that you know.
Dude.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:24 PM | Comments (11)
January 14, 2007
Eric Burns-White: The necropost for January 14: Star Harbor Nights
A brief post to make up for the missed day on January 14 (penned all the way on January 29), in praise of Star Harbor Nights, a superhero fiction site run by the action squad of Alexandria Erin (who is a sometimes commenter over here at Websnark), Quinn Isley and Sonya Kenderdragon (which might -- might be a pseudonym. Though, given I used to write superhero fiction under the name Eric, Lord Sabre, I'm not about to rag on someone for a sobriquet.)
I know from Superhero writing -- especially the building of a shared universe completely separate from those that came before. As I've mentioned many, many times my first heavy internet activities were based around the Superguy mailing list -- which while more satirical than Star Harbor Nights certainly shared some of the frenetic joy in the form that Erin, Isley and Kenderdragon have brought to their stuff.
It reminds me, really, of how much I miss writing Superguy, and things like that. Last November, I made a serious effort to do a superheroic mosaic novel. Sadly, said novel was a failure -- it just fell apart almost immediately. I might be able to write several novels about the intertwined stories I was mosaicing, but I couldn't create enough of a thread to make the mosaic work.
So, if you like superheroes for themselves (as opposed to liking "the X-Men" or other character specific stuff), you might want to give Star Harbor Nights a look see. It's free, so it sure can't hurt, and they seem to be having a lot of fun, and in the end that's the sense I would want in a site like this one.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:57 PM | Comments (5)
