I'm not dead yet.

Okay, I get the hints about communicating more often. :P I've still been feeling pretty run-down... even the first two sessions of my D&D games have been a little less unfocused, though we're early enough in the campaigns that I think there's a little more leeway for things to be unfocused. I'm getting better, though.

I called my doctor to ask her if there was any chance that the aspirin regimen she put me on could be responsible for chronic fatigue. Knowing that aspirin's a blood thinning agent, I actually had dire visions of hidden internal bleeding or something. She asked me about my fluid intake habits, and it kind of clicked into place. I've upped my fiber intake quite a bit but had pretty much fallen back to just drinking soft drinks during the day.

Now, the old chestnut that if you don't drink Just Plain Water you will dehydrate yourself is just that: a chestnut. The diuretic effect of soda and juice and such isn't so completely powerful that it cancels out all the huge volume of water you're taking in along with the other junk and then some. But soda doesn't hydrate efficiently, and replacing my salty snack foods with whole grain fiber cereal... well, yeah. So I'm supposed to do some electrolyte replenishment and then drink more water.

I go through phases of preferring water to soda and vice versa, mostly depending on where I am in my battle with sleeplessness. This just happened to be in the middle of my soda cycle. :P

A spot of bright news: popelizbet has been leaning on me to develop some of my short story ideas for other venues, and a while back I actually wrote one and sent it off to Circlet Press, who were planning to do some fairy tale-themed gay erotica anthologies. The book just came out today.

My selection is a retelling of Cinderella, called "Two Balls".

I don't think this is actually my first professional sale, as I'm pretty sure I've sold at least one story to a paying zine at some point. It's not a big payday, for that matter... but I like Circlet and I'd like to see them sell more books. So check it out, or at least help spread the news: AE has sold out a story in the newest Circlet anthology.

Folks who read the latest MUpdate might notice a blurb at the bottom saying "Wednesday" and listing some upcoming events. On Friday, I decided started writing notes to myself about what needed to happen in the next chapter to keep things moving along. Today, I wrote a quick blurb for my own benefit and then decided to share it with everybody else. This gives a specific commitment for Wednesday... not just that there will be an update but what it will be. Making it a feature on the page will also help me remember to keep doing it.

I'll blog more tomorrow. There's a few personal updates and musings and things that I have backlogged in the past few weeks, but if I stay in front of the computer as my pill starts to take hold I'll end up powering through it and being up all night. It's time for me to crash.

Blooded.

So, I saw the film version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince a while back and I don't think I ever wrote up my thoughts on it.

It takes kind of an odd approach to the source material... there are dark forces swirling about, a decade-spanning war is coming to a head once more, conspiracy and murder and magic and mystery... and yet with so much potential for truly epic storytelling, the filmmakers choose to focus more on the soap opera-style melodrama of teenage romance and angst in a film that just plods on and on with no end in sight.

So, you know I liked it.

No, seriously, I thought it was a decent movie. It wasn't the book, but they couldn't have filmed the book.

The one part of it that ended up striking a sour note for me was the gutting of the mystery of the identity of the Half-Blood Prince. In the book, Harry's as obsessed with finding out who the genius was who wrote all the notes in his old textbook as he is with finding out what Draco's up to. The movie pays lip service to his attempts to catch Malfoy, showing him watching the Marauder's map and so forth, but he reads the name in the front of the book and doesn't think twice about it. His attitude seems to be "don't know, don't care". This makes Snape's declaration at the end--a dramatic revelation in the book--kind of an odd anti-climax. Dropping it, though, would have made the title seem even more out of place.

I can understand if they didn't feel they had room for a whole investigative subplot, but a few more lines playing up the book and its importance in Harry's newfound academic success... allowing a few more references to the Half-Blood Prince (Harry saying he owes him a lot, Hermione saying it's only because of the Prince that he's succeeding... this would also have allowed them to slip in a quick reference to the name's origin, Hermione saying, "How do we know the Prince was a he? There was an Eileen Prince at Hogwarts.", which could have been called back to after Snape's declaration.

Anything else that played up the book and Harry's "intellectual debt" to its previous owner would have made the ending more of the gut-punch it needed to be for the title to make sense. Yes, I know that most of the audience already knew who the Half-Blood Prince was going in and so any extra tension or mystery would be lost on us, but it's things like this that make me feel like the movies don't stand up as well on their own as they ought to.

I have a differing opinion from a lot of people, in that I liked the first two movies the best, I thought the third one seemed pretty good, and I didn't much care for the fourth or fifth ones. It seems' there's a critical (and to some extent, popular) consensus that Chris Columbus delivered a pair of clunkers and the third one's where it started to get good, but... meh. I think at their core, the first two books were just more filmable, being shorter and less intricate. I watched the first three before I got into the books, and after reading them I didn't feel like the first two had really been missing anything critical, while the third one started a trend of such uneven omissions, with the odd decision not to explain the origin of the Marauder's map or the names on it.

Evanna Lynch continues to be a bright spot of the later movies. I have mad fierce love for Luna Lovegood, and the actress who brings her to life does an incredible job with a character who would be so easy to get wrong. I hope she has a long and enjoyable career ahead of her.

Cute Kitten Suckerpunch

A friend of mine works for the Meriden Humane Society in Meriden, Connecticut. This is a no-kill shelter that works hard to provide food, medical care, and ultimately (hopefully) homes for cats and dogs. This is not an easy job to do by any stretch of the imagination, and they struggle with getting the funds for their basic operations, much less getting information out there to the public.

My friend made this video using the tools she had available (a simple digital camera and the Windows movie making software, based on my market research which tells me that:

1) The internet is magic.
2) The internet loves kittens.

Maybe you don't live in Connecticut, maybe you don't have the money to spare for an animal shelter across the country when there are local ones whose needs are just as great. But if you've ever in your life forwarded/crossposted a picture or video of an adorable baby animal for any reason, please consider doing so now for great justice. If enough people see this little guy, some of them will be just the right junction of motive and opportunity for do-goodery. Some of them might be in the Meriden area and they might decide to give a home to a cat or dog from the shelter, instead of buying one from a backyard breeder or supporting efforts to import pets for adoption to regions that already have a pet population problem.

And some people everywhere might realize that there are underfunded and overcrowded shelters, and thus no need for their cats to keep producing litters. That's a win for shelters everywhere.