Category: Miscellanea

“My Best Friend is a Prince from Another World”

Update 12/2022: finally getting some new chapters up after a long break, and added a synopsis below.

I’ve been working on a “novel” for a couple of years now; it’s not fan-fiction for any story in particular, but it is intended as something of a general homage to a number of genres I like (western portal fantasy, “Isekai” anime/light novels, and shonen rom-com stories.)

I’ve been posting the finished first part (~30,000 words) at Scribblehub and have been posting the less-well-edited and very much “work in progress” second part on and off as I get chapters done.

My Best Friend is a Prince from Another World (series page on Scribblehub)

Synopsis

“…so other worlds with magic are real, and supposedly my mom was a princess from one of them and they’re asking me to go there because I’m next in line for the throne.”

High school friends Mark and Joel have their lives uprooted when Joel discovers that his late mother was actually a princess who fled from another world. With the King old and infirm, Joel is asked to return to that world and take his place as the rightful heir.

Before that, he has to graduate high school. How will Joel be able to live in a new world and claim his throne?

Mark, a nerdy and isolated young man, follows his one close friend to a new high school in a new world. After all, it can’t be worse than NYC in the early 1990s…?

Spelunking my own blog

One of the odd things about having kept this up for ~15 years is that there is plenty of old stuff I don’t remember it all, like: https://www.cubiclehermit.com/archives/482

For the record.

I do not now, and I have never owned an iPod or Zune.

I’ve owned three MP3 players:
[….]
I keep hoping that battery life on my PDA/phones will improve to the point where it will not be necessary to have a separate MP3 player. Sadly, I see little improvement there, and my present phone (a new HTC Touch Pro) is something of a step backwards for music player use as they went from a semi-proprietary small headset plug to an entirely proprietary USB+sound+etc plug.

(Lest the basic reference not make sense)
For the record, I do not now, and have never owned any Apple iDevices, nor any Intel Macs, nor any Microsoft portable consumer electronics (although I’ve had and have had a few keyboards, mice, and 3 generations of XBox [edit late 2021: 4].)

For that worth, it basically be be about another ~2 years before I got a phone that could “just work” as an MP3 player with adequate battery life. The HTC Touch Pro got replaced with a “Sprint Epic” (a 1st-gen Galaxy S with a slider keyboard) which also brought back proper headphone jacks.

(I’ve yet to succumb to a headphone-jack-less phone in the return of such things, but it seems close to inevitable… 🙁 )

Oh, and the dead WSJ link there seems to refer to this: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2270831/zunegate–is-obama-an-ipresident-or-not-.html

A confusion of Churchills…

Apropos of nothing, but awesome in a “I didn’t know that” sort of way:
http://johnfinnemore.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/two-of-kind.html:

This is nice. In 1899, Winston Churchill was 25, an aspiring politician, and the author of a couple of books. He was not, however, the most famous Winston Churchill around. That was the now largely forgotten, but at the time best-selling, American novelist… Winston Churchill. Aware of this, the British Winston Churchill wrote to his namesake as follows:

The original blog post is worth reading for the brief correspondence between the two.
Continue reading “A confusion of Churchills…”

A nice homage to older porn parodies…

IO9 posted a nice homage to older porn parodies (back before they were just “This Ain’t (insert original film’s name here)” or “(insert original film’s name here): An XXX Parody.”

The Greatest Science Fiction Porn Movies of All Time: 1961-1991
Continue reading “A nice homage to older porn parodies…”

Moved

My blog (and personal web site, family web site, and some others I host) have moved to new hosting. Between caps from AT&T Uverse, and just wayyy too much persona data on my home server, I figured it was for the best. The down side is it’s no longer Gentoo, and not quite so bleeding edge. Plus a few bucks a month.

On the up side, I’ve got a lot more upstream bandwidth, and a much greater sense of security. Worth it!

Upgraded, not that anyone cares.

I’ve been doing most of my updating on Facebook. I’m hoping I can find a way to pull my updates down here, for non-Facebook people, or to push some of the updates up. Til then, not much is new.

OTOH, I did upgrade mysql to 5.5, and wordpress to 3.2. Woot, I think.

Spain, not Japan? Seriously?

Apparently There Is A Meat Vending Machine In Spain

Spain is a magical place. How do we know this? Because they apparently have a meat vending machine.

Said vending machine is located outside a 100-year-old butcher shop and allows customers to buy meat around the clock. The vending machine features meats, sausages, sandwiches and other goods on a seasonally rotating basis.

A letter I sent to the Chancellor of UCSC and the Chief of Campus Police.

I spent an hour stuck in UCSC local traffic trying to get to class, only to be forced to turn around by (expetive deleted) protesters while a campus PD officer stood and did nothing. Then spend another half hour stuck in traffic getting away from campus.
Continue reading “A letter I sent to the Chancellor of UCSC and the Chief of Campus Police.”