text:
Mini Bike Army - Vancouver

Labour Day Back to School Special and B:C:Clettes Welcome Home Ride

Monday September 3, 2007 it's the Back to School Special and the Welcome Home B:C:Clettes Mini Bike Army Ride. It may be a long title but that's half the fun.

Mini Bike Army invites you to ride mini bikes (or whatever bike you have) on a holiday Monday afternoon ride. Meet at noon at the Science World Gazebo, ride at 12:30 to downtown, to the beaches, down Robson for some exposure, probably for food since mini bike riding takes a bit of energy... and perhaps some other special treat? Yes, it's probably the last opportunity for a mini bike Monday with nice weather. Don't hesitate, just ride.

Welcome home the B:C:Clettes from their westcoast tour with some bike love. Depending on how tired/busy the B:C:Clettes are, could they surprise us with a special performance? Doubtful, but if we entice them with beer, perhaps? We'll see who shows up I suppose.

Also, note on September 7th it's the Chris Mass. More details at for that ride.

Labels: , ,

  • At 2/2/13 06:16 , Anonymous Anonymous said...

    Thanks for any other informative blog. Where else could I get that type of information
    written in such an ideal method? I have a venture that I'm simply now operating on, and I've been on the glance out for such info.
    Also see my web site :: search engine optimization india

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home


Content-Type: application/http; msgtype=response

WARC-Type: response

text:
Mayor To Announce Vikings Stadium Jobs Plan

View Comments
(credit: CBS) Holly Wagner
You may have seen Holly Wagner's live reports on the morning show a...
Read More

MINNEAPOLIS (AP/WCCO) — Mayor RT Rybak, along with community leaders, will announce a workforce agreement Monday to help create jobs at a new Vikings stadium.

The agreement will be announced at a press conference at 1 p.m. Monday at the Gridiron Club at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. The plan is for a site to be built next to the Metrodome.

The new plan would put the stadium just east of where the Metrodome now stands on what is currently a parking lot.

Earlier plans to build on the Metrodome site would require the Vikings to move elsewhere for as long as three years, likely to TCF Bank Stadium on the University of Minnesota campus.

Ted Mondale, chairman of the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, said the plan — which is still being shaped — could see a new stadium as much as three-fourths done before the Metrodome would have to be demolished. Mondale said in that scenario the Vikings could stay in the Dome through 2015, with a new stadium complete by 2016.

Lester Bagley, the Vikings vice president for stadium development and public affairs, said the goal is to cut down on time the team plays at TCF Bank Stadium. Playing at the university stadium would also require about $50 million to make the facility NFL-ready.

“It’s the dome site proposal but shifting it,” Bagley said. “The idea is to eliminate the three seasons we’re playing at the university.”

Bagley said the Vikings, city and state officials are looking to prepare a funding package for this newest proposal in the next week to 10 days. Bagley said the team isn’t convinced the new plan is affordable.

The Vikings have said their preferred site is the St. Paul suburb of Arden Hills, but the site’s been ruled out by Gov. Mark Dayton without any clear source of local government revenue. Another site near a historic church on the western edge of downtown Minneapolis has also been rejected.

Stadium bill sponsor Rep. Morrie Lanning, R-Moorhead, said a new proposal would have to be ready in the next couple of weeks for lawmakers to consider it this session.

(TM and © Copyright 2012 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2012 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

View Comments
blog comments powered by Disqus

warcinfo:
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-206-219.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-22
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf


text:
Beyond Bounds: 9 Things You Need To Know About Mitchell Swanson

View Comments
Mitchell Swanson's one of the state's top goal scorers. (credit:

Mitchell Swanson of Wadena-Deer Creek has tallied 29 goals this year, good enough to be second-best in the state. (credit:

What’s sweeter – going from a 1-24 record to a solid 6-8 start, or being one of the State of Hockey’s top goal scorers?

Lucky for Mitchell Swanson of Wadena-Deer Creek, he’s double dipping.

The senior forward’s 29 goals have him ranked second in Minnesota, as he has blown past his 2011-12 total of 20.

Yes, he’s quite lean, weighing in at 146 pounds for his 6-foot frame. But he’s living the high life working at the local movie theatre and watching new releases for free.

Oh, and he loves Alicia Keys — go figure. Here are nine things you need to know about Mr. Swanson.

1 — A 1-win season last year is now a distant memory
It was our first year with a new coach (Chris Holman). We needed to learn a new system and just a bunch of factors along the lines of that.

Senior Mitchell Swanson has helped Wadena-Deer Creek forget about its 1-24 season in 2011-12. (credit: Swanson family)

Mitchell Swanson (left) has helped Wadena-Deer Creek forget about its 1-24 season in 2011-12. (credit: Swanson family)

2 — What’s the difference for this year’s boost in victories?
We have a productive second line now. We have two freshmen (Dylan Phillips and Mike Behl) and a foreign exchange student (Otto Asp) who are putting the puck in the net. And we’re having some solid goaltending.

3 — If you’re 6 feet tall and not even 150 pounds … do you eat?
(Laughs). My metabolism won’t let me keep it. I am still strong on my feet, though. When I was younger, my older brother Brandon would play against me, and throw me around so I knew what to expect when I got older.

4 — What are your personal ambitions this season?
I’m aiming for 100 points. I needed 43 points at the beginning of the year. I’m two away now.

5 — How do you react when you see yourself atop the state’s scorers?
It’s pretty awesome. My teammates definitely tell me about it.

Swanson credits two freshman additions to the team for helping the program be much more competitive this winter. (credit: Swanson family)

Swanson credits two freshman additions for the team’s current 6-8 record.
(credit: Swanson family)

6 — What sends you to North Dakota State University for criminal justice next year?
I want to be a probation officer. My dad has been a cop before, so I grew up with that.

7 — No hockey scholarships yet?
No coaches have contacted me so far. But I will definitely listen if someone talks. If not, I’ll move on and play on a club team at NDSU.

8 — Best movies you’ve seen for free courtesy of working at The Cozy Theatre?
I sell concessions there, and I loved “Skyfall,” “The Watch” and “The Hobbit.”

9 — How close were you to the tornado that hit Wadena back in 2010?
It hit right across the street from my house. I took pictures of it through my front window. It took a couple shingles of our house, but didn’t affect us too much.

View Comments
blog comments powered by Disqus


text:
Herb Galliart

(credit from top left to bottom right: Hannah Foslien/Getty Images; Duluth News Tribune/DuluthNewsTribune.com; Thomas Whisenand/University of St. Thomas; Concordia)

Beyond Bounds: My 5 Favorite People Of 2012

From an octogenarian who’s tallied a hole-in-one more often than Tiger Woods, to a college football star who speaks Latin – yes, Latin – I’ve relished getting to know some of Minnesota’s most intriguing sports stories in 2012.

Herb Galliart (credit: Duluth News Tribune/DuluthNewsTribune.com)

Beyond Bounds: Hole-In-Ones — 83-Year-Old MN Man Tops Tiger Woods

Until Tiger Woods hits his next hole-in-one, he’s still behind an 83-year-old from Cloquet, Minn. The game’s best player has 18 aces, but retiree Herb Galliart has 19.


WARC-Truncated: length

text:
What is IPE?

Afghanistan-UN.jpgWhat is International Political Economy

Economic globalization has fundamentally changed the way we live: the way corporations conduct business, the way countries construct and implement their social and economic development strategies, the way engineers design products, and the role individuals play in the global economy.

WorldBank-Africare.jpgNew organizational structures are emerging: from regional-markets and regional-states in Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific, Russia and Eurasia, and Sub-Saharan Africa to the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and even the United Nations. New interlinked and interdependent global systems are being forged and are flourishing. Traditional paradigms fail to explain fully the complex realities of the contemporary world.

WorldBank-China.jpgInternational Political Economy (IPE) provides new, integrated, and flexible ways of conceptualizing, analyzing, interpreting, and generalizing the contemporary world. IPE is an applied social science that builds on the theoretical, empirical, and analytical approaches and methods of political science, economics, sociology,anthropology, geography, and history. At Colorado School of Mines (Mines), the faculty combines both IPE and comparative political economy (CPE) to provide methodological flexibility and at the same time, breadth, depth, and diversity in our curriculum and research agenda.

© 2015 Colorado School of Mines | | Equal Opportunity | Privacy Policy | Directories | Text Only | Mines.edu | rss

Last Updated: 06/27/2014 12:47:35


text:
The TeX Catalogue Online

Print a class calendar.

This package is intended to print a term calendar for use in planning a class. It has a flexible mechanism for specifying which days of the week are to be included and for inserting text either regularly on the same day each week, or on selected days, or for a series of consecutive days. It also has a flexible mechanism for specifing class and nonclass days. Text may be inserted into consecutive days so that it automatically flows around nonclass days.

See also calendar kalender plcalendar.

The author is Bill Mitchell.

License: lppl1 Version: 1.8 Catalogued: 2012-04-19


text:
Contact Us

‘The Voice’ Recap: Top 3 Artists Revealed

Christopher Polk, Getty Images

It’s been an exciting season of ‘The Voice’ so far, to say the very least. Tonight’s episode (Dec. 11) was both surprising and bittersweet, as one contestant was sent home while the other three remain.

Although Adam Levine and Christina Aguilera no longer have any singers left on the show, they are still passionately involved in the competition. “I’m so proud of these guys,” said Levine. “I’m genuinely happy and excited and thrilled for these four and all that they’ve accomplished.” Aguilera then stated, “The four of us coming together as coaches, we truly care and are so invested in the song choices and who they wanna be as artists … It’s been a great show,” she gushed. “The pressure’s off of me, but no matter what, they’re so talented and they’ve grown leaps and bounds.”

Team Blake’s Terry McDermott and Cassadee Pope kicked off the night’s performances by singing a rendition of ‘Little Talk’ by Of Monsters and Men. Not long after, Juliet Simms – a name you all might recognize from Season 2 of ‘The Voice’ – delivered ‘Wild Child,’ complete with an impressive black cape. The episode also featured performances by a few more of the show’s veterans, including ‘Boyfriend’ by RaeLynn and ‘Roads’ by Chris Mann.

The four singers were incredibly humble when asked about their various musical inspirations. “For me, it was hearing the Eagles and Queen and all of the greats – when you hear that music, it reminds you of the beginning,” said McDermott. “The first music I listened to was Whitney Houston,” added Trevin Hunte. Pope then stated, “Certain melodies would make me cry, so it was just an emotional connection with me right off the bat.”

The show’s host, Carson Daly, used that vulnerable moment to his advantage and asked Pope, “How do you find the connection to lyrics that other people have written?” Her response was as follows: “I put myself in their positions … I think about all the obstacles they have to overcome. Even before my old band, I went through a lot … I built myself a thicker skin and try to live in that moment.”

Team Cee Lo‘s Hunte and Nicholas David rounded out the episode by delivering a moving and heartfelt version of Mariah Carey’s ‘Hero.’ “You’re both very special and very different,” remarked Levine in response to their performance. “I’ve grown to know you as people and as talents and I was so wrong not to turn around for you guys.”

At this point, it’s clear that all four artists have won us over in one way or another. Check below to find out which contestants remain.

Team Blake:
•   Terry McDermott
•   Cassadee Pope

Team Cee Lo:
•   Nicholas David

While we’re busy getting over the shock of Hunte being eliminated, Blake Shelton offered some hopeful words to his two remaining contestants. “It’s difficult to see two of my best people see pitted against each other,” he said. “You have my love, my respect, my admiration and my loyalty and I will be with both of you from this day forward. May the best man win.”

Best of Mix 94.1

Recommended For You

Around the Web

Leave a Comment

It appears that you already have an account created within our VIP network of sites on . To keep your personal information safe, we need to verify that it's really you. To activate your account, please confirm your password. When you have confirmed your password, you will be able to log in through Facebook on both sites.

Forgot your password?

*Please note that your prizes and activities will not be shared between programs within our VIP network.

It appears that you already have an account on this site associated with . To connect your existing account just click on the account activation button below. You will maintain your existing VIP profile. After you do this, you will be able to always log in to using your original account information.

*Please note that your prizes and activities will not be shared between programs within our VIP network.

Please fill out the information below to help us provide you a better experience.

(Forgot your password?)

Not a member? Sign up here

Sign up for MIX VIP Club quickly by connecting your Facebook account. It's just as secure and no password to remember!

Sign up to have exclusive MIX VIP Club contests, events, coupons, presales, and much more delivered to you for FREE.


text:
urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit the essential kit kit kit 2015-05-27T10:32:08Z urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1079299 very slow progress 2015-05-27T10:32:08Z 2015-05-27T10:32:08Z
I’m making such slow progress with organizing/packing/whatever that I feel like I’m not doing anything at all. Still. Again. Whatever.

And again, it’s not true. Saturday a friend came over and watched Young Indiana for a few minutes while Ted and I ran out to get boxes-for-books from our local bookstore, who had very kindly set some aside for us. There is now a giant pile of (flat) boxes in the dining room, where they are depressing me by Taking Up Space. It’s only going to get worse when I start making them into boxes and putting books into them, because then I’ll have Full Boxes Taking Up Space AND Empty Bookshelves Taking Up Space, but there’s nothing to be done about that right now.

As payment for babysitting, our friend was given cinnamon rolls straight from the oven, another box of clothes for her 3 year old, and got to go around the house laughing out loud at my To Do lists. (This is the person who asked if I’d considered project management. :))

Baby clothes have been boxed up to send to a cousin who is having a baby soon; that will go into the mail today or tomorrow. There’s a laundry basket of dirty clothes and a basket of “please try to figure out what to do with these” clothes in the living room. There are also random empty boxes that now-Goodwilled-clothes have been extracted from, and they (the empty boxes) are upsetting me because they Take Up Space, but they’re in good condition so should probably have other stuff packed into them instead of being tossed. Still, I feel very crowded and claustrophobic right now. :p

Nearly all of the DVDs have been put into their lovely new binders now, which is a massive savings in space. It’s beautiful. It’ll be even more beautiful when Ms Neurotically Alphabetizes Things, ie, Yours Truly, gets a chance to alphabetize them, but right now they’re at least in attractive casings that take up less than a third of the space they used to. That’s something.

It sure doesn’t feel like very much, though. #sigh

In non-house-work, I’ve gotten a very small amount of work done on the Greywalker Papers short story with Kat Richardson, and am working my way through BEWITCHING BENEDICT, my Regency romance novel, trying to prep it to send to my editor. It’s a completely charming book. I guess I get that it’s not Romance Industry Style, but it’s so cute it just seems ridiculous that the rigid style Must Be Adhered To. Oh well. I’d hoped to have it out in July, but ahahaha moving so maybe August. And I have to get REDEEMER written, aigh.

Honestly, I feel like a mouse on a wheel. Running like hell to no obvious effect. I keep thinking I’ll gain traction and be okay, but no, just around again.

Off I go on another spin.

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1078603 Love Conquers All 2015-05-25T12:22:11Z 2015-05-25T12:22:11Z
1.9 million people turned out to vote on Friday, a 60.5% turnout that saw the highest number of ballots ever cast in an Irish referendum.

1.2 million of those people voted for marriage equality.

It seemed pretty clear by half an hour into the count that it was trending heavily toward a win for equality, but everyone here remained on pins and needles through the morning, growing increasingly hopeful as it appeared the measure wasn’t just going to pass, but was heading rapidly toward a landslide 2-to-1. My entire Twitter feed was full of people on the verge of nervous tears, and by the time the official count was announced around 5pm the whole city was basically glowing with disbelieving joy.

*One* constituency had a majority of no, by a .6% margin; another passed by 33 votes. There were a lot of places that were 51/49 in favour, and others that passed 85/15 in favour.

66,000 people were added to the supplemental voting registry in the last weeks before the vote; eighty percent of them turned out to vote.

Pundits speaking for the Church and other No Campaign organisations said they’d lost the Irish Mammy (a veritable institution), and that the women of the villages and rural communities were, it seemed, looking beyond the moment and thinking of their children and grandchildren, reckoning the odds that at least one of them would be gay, and voting not only voting yes for them, but working on their husbands to do the same.

The fear, the huge fear, here, was of the Silent No: the people who wouldn’t admit they were going to vote no, and might be skewing the polls, which were running about 52/48 in favour–but the results were 62.1% in favour, 37.9% against. It seems that there may well have been a Silent Yes, instead: a rural farmer with five children and numerous grandchildren refused any pamphlets or flyers, saying he didn’t want his neighbors to know he was voting yes, but that Ireland had to change.

The most heartbreaking story I heard coming out of the Yes Campaign was from Tipperary, where one of the canvassers came back to his group in tears. He’d just spoken to a 90 year old man who had, as they talked, broken down into tears himself and said, “It’s too late for me, but I wish you all well, and I’ll be voting yes on Friday so that it will never be too late again for anybody else.”

It’ll never be too late for anybody else. Ireland, and by extension the world, is a palpably better place than it was three days ago.

It’s not very often you can say that, that you can *know* it, with certainty, but this time? This time I think we can. Love conquers all!

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1078365 Marriage Referendum 2015-05-22T14:55:10Z 2015-05-22T14:55:10Z
Ireland is going to the polls today to decide whether or not marriage is for everybody. It’s apparently the first time in the world that the question of marriage equality has been put to a national vote, so frankly, it’s going to be a huge fecking embarrassment if it fails.

I voted at about 11:30 this morning. The polling station said turnout was excellent so far. Last night in Dublin I walked by half a dozen people inside a block wearing YES! buttons, and a friend who works in city centre said this morning it seems like every other person, maybe even more than every other person, was wearing a yes badge.

Uber is volunteering free cab rides to and from the polls. The airlines have been adding flights–apparently there were 18 more flights than usual coming into Dublin last night, because thousands of ex-pats are coming home to vote, as Irish law says you can’t vote unless you’re on Irish soil. I’ve seen tweets from so many places. Berlin. Abu Dhabi. Nairobi. Sydney. Toronto. San Francisco. London. Bangkok. New York. Barcelona. Ethiopia. Geneva. There’s a #hometovote tag trending world-wide on Twitter (some of the best are collected here), as is #YesVote, which means the whole world is literally talking about this today.

The #hometovote tag is wonderful, and I was getting sniffly over it while sitting in the café waiting to collect Henry from preschool. One of the dads walked by and said, “Oh no! Are you sick again?” as I blew my nose, and I had to confess, with a faint degree of embarrassment, that no, I was just getting emotional over the marriage referendum.

“I voted yes,” he said. “Everyone I know except one old couple in Offaly is voting yes.”

Everybody I know is voting yes, too, except one misguided mother of a friend. I hope we are in fact the majority, and not a bubble beyond which we cannot see.

I want it to be a landslide victory for equality. I think it may be a narrow one. I’m afraid we’ll lose, but that hardly bears thinking about.

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1078018 TV on DVD: s3 Arrow 2015-05-21T14:44:50Z 2015-05-21T14:45:00Z
TV on DVD: s3 Arrow: If I were stronger, I would stop watching Arrow now.

It’s not that I don’t like it. I *do* like Arrow; I’ve liked it from the start. I have issues with all the secret-keeping (issues which paid off in spades this season, actually, especially at the end), but I really like it and normally I’d be happy to watch it through five seasons, which is as far as it should go even if it’s probably going to go a lot farther. I want to see what happens with Diggs, particularly, because this could be the Diggs & Felicity Show for all I care and I’d be super thrilled. But it’s not, and my problem here is that I really, really loved the end of season 3.

I mean, really, truly loved it. And I…I want it to be done, with that ending. And it won’t be. It won’t be for a thousand reasons, not least of which is that they’ve, y’know, been renewed for a fourth season, and because there are now two spin-off shows plus Supergirl happening in the DCTVU, so even if Arrow ended, we’d probably see cameos and what-not in all those other shows, and because–

–well, I can’t say the last because without spoilers, so herein lies the spoiler cut. I’m going to say exactly what happens in the final scene and why it means a lot to me, so if you don’t want to know, don’t click through.

Right now, in this final scene, Felicity and Oliver get their happy ending. They drive off into the sunset together. It’s perfect, and it’s what they deserve, and it is, by God, what I, as the viewer, deserve.

Felicity Smoak is technically a DC property prior to Arrow‘s arrival on the scene, but her character on Arrow is pretty significantly re-imagined for Arrow. She’s a wonderful character. I love her. I *love* her.

But she’s not the girl who’s ever gonna get the guy.

She’s had flirtations/relationships with at least three major heroes: Green Arrow, the Flash, and the Atom. The flirtation with Barry Allen actually really killed me, because she’s obviously never gonna get Ollie, and to have her and Barry share this attraction was just–that was not fucking fair, okay? Because it’s bad enough she’s never gonna get one superhero, but *two*? She’s the girl who isn’t going to end up with Arrow *or* the Flash? That just *sucks*. That *sucks*, man.

Because Felicity is the audience stand-in. Felicity is as close as we ladies (and presumably not just a few men) on the other side of the screen are ever gonna get to adoring–and being adored by–a superhero.

But Ollie ends up with Diana Lance–the Black Canary–for all intents and purposes. Barry Allen ends up with Iris West. This is DC canon and they’re not going to mess with it for the TV shows, not to that level.

Ray Palmer–the Atom–canonically has a girlfriend when he becomes the Atom. Felicity is technically Ray’s girlfriend when he becomes the Atom, in the show. In the canon, his girlfriend when he becomes the Atom GOES ON TO MURDER PEOPLE. That would be an unforgiveable road to take with Felicity, and I can’t see it happening. Also, although Brandon Routh has almost totally won me over as Palmer, I can’t get past the incredibly creepy stalker behaviour he displayed in the first episodes. It just bugs me. I don’t want to let myself forget it, because it was *so* *creepy*. So argh. Yeah, okay, if I let myself forget for half a minute, Felicity and Ray are really kind of great together in their dorktastic way–but I don’t want to let creepy stalker behaviour slide. And even if I do, the odds of Felicity getting that guy, either, seem vanishingly slim.

So I want this ending. I want Felicity to get what Smallville never even pretended Chloe–also the audience stand-in character–might get: the happy ending with the leading man.

I might even want it enough to stop watching Arrow.

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1077860 How To Create An Exhaustive To-Do List 2015-05-21T12:56:44Z 2015-05-21T13:02:36Z
I’ve had several people ask me in the past few days, half-jokingly and perhaps half-not, if I could make them a major To Do list, or if I could come to their house and purge (I totally will, too. It’s way more fun to throw away other people’s stuff. The thing is, you have to let me…), or if I could give an example of my lists to draw from.

I can do that, sure. :) Let’s say you need to Do Something About Your Books. (I reckon this is a fairly understandable topic for those who read my blog. :)) More, let us presume you are actually Willing To Do Something About Your Books, because if you’re not, well, there’s nothing a list can do to help you. Let us further presume that you have a major stash of books in at least three rooms in the house.

Do Something About My Books becomes an overwhelming task, left on its own like that. To deal with it, you gotta break it down. The farther you break it down, the easier it (nominally) becomes, because you have a small step to accomplish and then you get to mark something off the list and it looks like you did something!

So this is how I Deal With The Books:

– get boxes/bags
 » check with local bookstore/liquor store for book-appropriate boxes
 » arrange to collect boxes at a set time
 » collect boxes
 – create to-be-read shelf
 – cull TBR shelf:
 » am i REALLY going to read this? if no, box it
 – cull books (room by room/case by case/shelf by shelf: break it down as much as you need)
 » will i re-read it? really? really?
 » » keep
 » does it have sentimental value (signed/rare edition/fave author/etc)?
 » » keep
 – box/bag up what’s not sentimental or re-read material
 – when a box/bag is full, bring it to used bookstore/goodwill/library ASAP

For the record, the number of books I actually regret having chosen to ditch is below ten.

This is basically how I do to-do lists in general. Also, I add things to my lists all the time. They’re constantly evolving works in progress, so you don’t have to imagine you’ve got to get every step down the first time you approach the list.

In general, if you’re not a native list-maker (or even if you are) and would like to become one, GETTING THINGS DONE by David Allen is a good book on making lists and, well, getting things one. It’d be an even better book, of course, if I was rich enough to hire him to come help me get all the high-level shit he talks about dealt with, but in principle and in many practical applications, it’s an excellent book for this kind of thing.

I’ll put several more examples behind the cut, just in case they’re of any use to anybody.

Dealing with our DVDs meant:
 – find appropriate DVD wallets
 » check amazon
 » read amazon reviews
 » find actually quite nice binders
 » order a test set
 » put TV on DVD into binders
 » discover they don’t all fit
 » order more
 » finish putting TV on DVD into binders
 » throw away/flatten TV on DVD boxes
 » put film on DVD into binders
 » throw away one zillion DVD cases
 » rejoice

The culling clothes edition looked like this:
 – move enough stuff around in the shed that i can reach the boxes of clothes
 – bring the boxes of clothes in
 – wash the clothes
 – fold the clothes
 – sort the clothes
 – bag the clothes
 – bring clothes to charity shop
 » again
 » and again
 » and again…

Here’s a self-publishing-a-book list:
 – email editor & find out what her plans are
 – hire cover artist
 – beatsheet book
 – write book
 – submit to editor
 – revise
 – submit for CEs
 – submit for cover design
 – submit for page layouts
 – get ISBNs
 – send to Audible for possible audio book
 – enter into Ingram’s system
 – book launch

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1077649 it’s the moving countdown 2015-05-20T09:48:35Z 2015-05-20T09:48:35Z
I’ve just spoken with the estate agent. The good news is that although the lease is up at the end of May, they do not expect us to be out of the house at the end of May.

Indeed, it appears we could continue to live here indefinitely until the house sells, with people coming in to look at it while we were living here. Which is not what we want to do, but it’s somewhat nice to know that if for some reason we can’t be out until August they’re not going to throw us onto the street (because even if the house sold tomorrow it takes months to close).

In reality, we have 42-56 days of Official Notice, which gets us well into July if we need it and through the end of June at the least. Which means I can reduce my freak-out level a little and try to get some damned writing/book production work done, as well as doing house-level purging and packing. :p

I need to email my whole production team and apologize for the delay, explain what’s up, and hopefully have stuff incoming to them by next week. Mnargh.

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll actually get to work on the Greywalker Papers crossover story, now that I know what’s what.

…I need to write a thinks to do list. Right after I bring this huge bag of clothes to a charity shop.

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1077391 moving house as project management 2015-05-19T16:17:33Z 2015-05-19T16:17:33Z
Yesterday a friend was over and she saw my 20-point Thinks To Do list for the living room and wondered what it was. I explained it was the pre-move to-do list. Not the moving list, just the preparing-to-move list.

“…have you ever considered project management?” she wondered. :) (Later she said, “Seriously. All it lacked was timelines and assigned roles & responsibilities, and I could have put it in Microsoft Project.”)

Anyway, despite the project management levels of lists lying around I’m feeling entirely unsuccessful in getting anything done.

This is not an accurate reflection of reality, mind you. The reason my friend was visiting was because I had a giant pile of 3-5 year old clothes to give her, which reflected approximately a third of the infant-to-5y/o clothes I have washed, sorted and folded. I have two overflowing laundry baskets of the same sitting in the living room, waiting for me to figure out how to get them to the charity shops. As a whole, they represent a *significant* amount of the stuff from the shed. Mostly Christmas stuff, gardening stuff, and things that belong to this house are left in there.

I’ve actually cleared out everything except the two boxes of books written by me (augh) under Young Indiana’s bed, which was one of the to-do items on lists I haven’t even posted on a wall yet, because they constitute Upstairs Work and I’m dealing with Downstairs Work.

Downstairs, 70% of the CDs have gone off to libraries and used bookstores, along with a dozen or so graphic novels, which are turning out to be harder to cull than I imagined. A lot of them seem to fall under “I want to re-read this before I decide if I’m gonna ditch it.” (I did get rid of one of my SEVEN COMPLETE SETS of the original ElfQuest, by giving them to the same friend who took the clothes & who had never read ElfQuest! I’m going to give another set to my nephew, but they have to move too, so it’d just be mean to give it to them before they do.) The laundry room, save for the toy box and camera equipment, Has Been Sorted. The toys requires grandparental intervention, so we can ditch stuff without Young Indiana standing by, and the camera stuff…just requires doing it.

I’ve arranged with my friendly neighborhood bookstore to collect boxes appropriate for books. I did a rough count of the books, which, horrifyingly, added up to probably in the region of 12-1500 books. And that’s with me being ruthless for years. (A third of those are graphic novels and gaming material, which is not precisely spoken in our defense, since it means there are still 800-1000 or so BOOKS. 200 of which are copies of BOOKS I WROTE. #dies)

I…can’t think of anything else I’ve actually accomplished, at this point. And all of the above doesn’t seem like much, because I’m Not Writing. I’m like clockwork. I worked really hard the first 3 months of the year and have had about 6 weeks off now and, as generally happens, I am now beginning to feel that I am getting NOTHING DONE AT ALL because I’m not writing. So I may go out in the crappy weather and write something, anything, tonight, just to be working on something, and maybe tomorrow I’ll feel like the moving work I’ve done is some kind of accomplishment.

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1077005 The Great Digital Move 2015-05-15T10:23:45Z 2015-05-15T10:23:45Z
I have just about completed ripping our CDs. This is a task that has been done in the past, but I’ve been unable to find the damn drive upon which the old rips were saved, and probably a new rip (10+ years later) is better quality anyway (it’s certainly faster), and because I have little need to own physical CDs, it will reduce our physical possessions by some percentage when I’m done. I’m trying hard to buy music digitally now, although mostly that means I just forget to buy it at all.

In ripping them, I’ve discovered we have a lot of great music we never listen to. @.@ I got a digital music player a few years ago but it hasn’t proven as satisfactory as we’d hoped. We have another Android-based one that’s better (if I can find it), so we’re going to have to get a decent speaker set for it or something and go from there, because really! Lots of good music here!

But I am MISSING a Jim Byrnes CD! Missing like I didn’t even know it existed, not missing like I have a copy and can’t find it (although I’m missing one in that sense too)! Love is a Gamble, 2001 from One Coyote Music. How can this BE?!

I’m also reminded, as I periodically am, that somehow I do not own Bon Jovi’s Keep the Faith on CD. I don’t know why. I must *have* at some point, because I think there was a digital copy of it made at some point, but I don’t have it and I don’t understand why. :) I own every other album they (and he) have done, so I just have no idea where Keep the Faith is. And it’s one of my favourite albums!

I also own every album Meat Loaf has ever done, even the stupendously bad ones. But I don’t feel any need to keep the physical copies of those. :) (Bon Jovi, Jim Byrnes & Martin Hayes are the 3 that for some reason I wish to retain physical media of. Possibly because I think they’re all hot.) Anyway, I’ve gotten a large, sturdy, well-made CD carrier so the CDs and liner notes can be kept tidily and the jewel cases can be ditched for everything we’re keeping.

In an attempt to Do Something about the TV on DVD, I found these DVD binders, who have turned out to be pretty good. They’re advertised as holding 20-25 pages of DVDs & liner notes, which appears to be pretty accurate, although it turns out Buffy & Angel together basically fill 2 of them and Highlander overflows one by a considerable margin. So I have to get some more, but they’ve reduced the space taken up by those 3 series by about 2/3rds, so they’re WORTH getting more of.

(I was putting DVDs into the pockets & being amused at the various pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar, David Boreanaz, Adrian Paul & Jim Byrnes at different ages and looking different sorts of sultry or noble or whatever, and then I picked up one with Peter Wingfield on it and made a sound inappropriate for company. #laughs And it’s clear to me from Twitter chat that some day I need to have a massive Methos Chronicles sleepover party weekend thing and basically all the women I know need to show up so we can giggle and squeal like idiots for three days straight.)

Oh, my, Ted’s been much braver culling his selection of CDs (his music is the hard rock, the pop, and the country; mine is the rock, the blues and the soundtracks, generally speaking) than I expected him to be. I didn’t need a 200 CD case to save what was left in. Well, that’s okay, it won’t hurt to have it. :)

All right, there we go. 366 albums ripped. I’m gonna go…listen to some music now. :)

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1076830 So we have to move. Again. 2015-05-14T10:22:07Z 2015-05-14T10:22:07Z
So we have to move. Again.

Our landlord died and the people who inherited the house have decided to sell it. (Precisely the same thing is happening to my sister right now.)1qq We don’t know when exactly we have to be out, but we have to be out. We also don’t know where exactly we’re going to end up, because the median rent in Dublin is more than we’re currently paying, which is more than we can actually afford, which means: not Dublin. Ted’s job is north of Dublin, so unless circumstances change, we’ll be going north. Somewhere. But most of the commutable distances are also getting vastly more expensive because nobody can afford to live in Dublin! It’s all very exciting.

I have, and I am not joking, a 70 point Preparation For Moving bullet list. (I counted. It really is 70 points.) I’ve spent the past ten days or so working on it. Much of it–most of it–is a room-by-room “get rid of stuff” list, with details on what I need to do/have/accomplish to Get Rid Of Things. This bullet list does not, sadly, include, say, packing, or finding somewhere to live. Or, indeed, me getting any actual work done.

I’m getting a tiny bit of work done anyway. I’m working on the crossover/fan fiction by the authors themselves/mashup Greywalker Papers story with Kat Richardson, and it’s GREAT FUN. It’s not, though, revising either book I have to finish revising, or writing REDEEMER, which was supposed to be my May project. The best-laid plans, etc etc etc.

The Get Rid Of Things side of things is going fairly well. I’m ripping CDs. We have a lot of great music we never listen to. I’m collapsing our TV on DVD into DVD wallets so it takes up about an eighth of the space it currently does, which will do my soul a gladness. I’m washing vast amounts of baby-and-small-child clothes and intend to bestow them upon other people. We have to do…something…about the graphic novels. Possibly re-read them all and see what we actually want to keep. So on and so forth for another 60 or so bullet points.

Anyway, the result of all this is I feel exceptionally un-bloggy, not so much that I don’t want to but almost literally all I’m doing is packing prep, which doesn’t make for a very exciting journal topic.

So, uh, that’s the fun going on here. How are you? O.O

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1076531 Picoreview: Woman in Gold 2015-05-11T14:12:37Z 2015-05-11T14:13:24Z
Picoreview: Woman in Gold: well worth watching.

Woman in Gold is based on the true story of an Austrian Jew whose family artwork was stolen by the Nazi occupation, and her international legal battle, sixty years later, to get it back. Helen Mirren plays Maria Altmann and Ryan Reynolds plays her lawyer, Randol Schoenberg, who comes from a long line of highly distinguished Schoenbergs and who has thus far totally failed to make his mark.

And good god, Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black plays the younger Altmann. That woman is an incredible chameleon. I had the vague idea I’d seen her before, but I never would have placed her. Good lord. Wow.

Anyway, Mirren is good, Reynolds is his usual affable self (I’m not particularly convinced he can act, although there were a couple of emotional moments in this where he was as good as I’ve ever seen him), and the story, which appears to be a reasonably accurate version of reality, is worth seeing it for.

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1076235 purging boxes 2015-05-08T17:54:02Z 2015-05-08T17:54:02Z
I’ve spent this afternoon Getting Rid Of Stuff. Some of this was of the prosaic “empty the trashes” nature, but the bulk of it was involved in going through boxes that have been sitting around with the intent to be gone through. The big thing to tackle was a large box of received correspondence from roughly 1990-1998. A few months ago in another one of these Getting Rid Of Stuff binges I almost threw it out wholesale, but held off, and days later realized with a shock that I was really glad I hadn’t tossed it, because the 4 page handwritten letter that AC Crispin wrote to me when I was 15 and had asked for writing advice from her was in it.

So today I opened the box with the intention to find that letter and throw everything else away.

I threw a *lot* of it away. Probably 75% of it, some of which were letters from (now) complete strangers. A few of them I remembered after a while, but others? I genuinely had no idea who they were. So those weren’t so hard to part with. Neither, as it turned out, were most of the letters I had from people I *do* remember and am mostly still in contact with.

I found the AC Crispin letter. I *also* found the letter from Anne McCaffrey, inviting me (and the friend I was travelling with) to Dragonhold, after I’d written to her before my first trip to Ireland and said I had to ask, at least, if I might be able to meet her. I didn’t think I still had that, so that was a lovely thing to discover.

I also found a number of letters from my grandmother, who died several years ago, and an old (really old, like, 6th grade!) journal, and a Beauty and the Beast short story I wrote around 1991-92 and which I’m considering posting, unedited, to my Patreon page, now that I’ve switched it over to being a short story project. :) And a bunch of other somewhat random memento-style stuff, much of which can probably be thrown away but which has for the moment gone back into the box because I’d done enough for the day.

The thing that really got me, though, in going through the box, was that I found what I had been sure would be the last pictures I’d ever see/take of a friend of mine who was very, very ill with Crohn’s, at a Christmas party in 1997. She was 5’8″ and about 92 pounds, and we all thought it would be her last Christmas.

It was not. She had surgery not very long after that, and she is alive and well and strong, and tomorrow is in fact what she calls her Phoenix Day, the 17th anniversary of her surgery, but my God, seeing those pictures. #feels

So I’m very very glad I didn’t just throw the box out.

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1075847 Recent Reads: Shaman 2015-05-05T14:04:19Z 2015-05-05T14:04:19Z
I’ve owned Kim Stanley Robinson’s SHAMAN since it came out, but hadn’t read it because I was still writing the Walker Papers, and regardless of how different his shaman and mine were likely to be (which was very, given that his book is set 40,000 years ago), I didn’t want to be reading about somebody else’s shaman while writing mine. :)

SHAMAN is one of those books that’s either going to work for you or it isn’t, I think, although a lot of KSR’s work can be summarized that way. I mean, I’m a tremendous fan of his and he still doesn’t always work for me.

SHAMAN did, though. Not because of the similarities between his shaman and mine, of which there was exactly one (Loon, our hero, is also a reluctant shaman), but because I thought he did a really nice job building a prehistoric society. Or several, rather, as Loon goes on an adventure to the North, and we also get a glimpse of Neandertal society, all of which I thought worked together as a pretty solid and believable set of societies. And having studied as much about shamanism as I have, I very much liked his depiction of the shamanic magic and duties, which are vastly more realistic than mine.

I had some problems with it. The young male narrator’s obsession with sex got a little tiring, and the nature writing didn’t sing the way I feel it does in the Science in the Capitol trilogy (although really, I think that series is exceptional in its nature writing, so any comparison is by necessity a little harsh), but the bit that really aggravated me was that I couldn’t figure out what continent it was taking place on…which I just realized is because I misplaced the origin of horses. I had it in my head they were like potatoes and tomatoes, originating on the American continents, but no, that’s backwards. Okay, it was me, not the book, and my confusion is all my own fault. Everything ELSE pointed to it being Eurasian in setting (in fact, I’m pretty sure I should be able to set it more preci–well, I can, because I know where the cave he used is, which is part of why it was confus–anyway.) Yeah, okay. I’m just an idiot.

There was a section-long chase scene in SHAMAN that was one of the best I’ve ever read. The only thing I can even think to compare it to is the chariot race in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sarantine Mosaic, which it’s tonally completely different from, but it was genuinely edge-of-the-seat reading, which is pretty stunning in a book.

There was also a moment where I thought he was going to turn the entire book on its ear, and I confess I would have been *delighted* to see it happen. I’ll illuminate behind a cut, because it’s a spoiler, but broadly speaking it’s like that moment in Winter Soldier where the heart of every woman watching leapt with joy and then collapsed again into, “Oh. Oh, well. I mean, that’s okay too, but…but it’s not as cool as it looked like it was going to be.”

It also made me tear up a little–twice!–which I think is a first for a KSR book. I was more emotionally invested than I thought I was, which is kind of wonderful.

Overall, not easy to recommend, but I find very little of KSR’s work easy to recommend. I thought it was worth the journey, though. In the end it’s a fairly powerful coming of age story, and I enjoyed it.

The spoiler: there are–well, several–main characters, but the three of importance here are Loon, our protagonist, who is a somewhat reluctant shaman-in-training; Thorn, his teacher; and Elga, his wife, who is from another tribe and quite a political player once she becomes part of this tribe. Thorn doesn’t like Elga at first (or rather, doesn’t think shamans should be married and disapproves of her on general principles), but he comes around for very good reasons. And there’s a moment of approval, very late in the book, where I really *genuinely* thought for a moment that Thorn was going to throw his reluctant apprentice over and train Elga as the tribe’s shaman instead.

It didn’t happen, but I really *truly* believed for just a moment that it was going to, and that would have been…so fucking cool. Loon grows into the role and it’s all fine and everything, but there’s just this one moment where there’s like this great shining light on Elga and I had the sense that Thorn abruptly realized that actually she would have been a far better shaman than Loon and…yeah. For a glorious instant I thought that was going to happen.

I would have fucking loved the book to pieces if it had, man.

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1075524 Picoreview: The DUFF 2015-05-04T21:45:57Z 2015-05-04T21:45:57Z
Picoreview: The DUFF: conflicting.

The DUFF is sort of this weird mashup of a high school makeover movie and, like, Juno, or something. DUFF stands for Designated Ugly Fat Friend, which the main character, played by Mae Whitman (who, at age 26, is a moderately convincing 18 year old), discovers she is one of. Except it appears the only person in her school who actually knows the term is the one who first uses it to describe her, the boy-next-door/jerkface/love interest, played by Robbie Amell (who, at 26, is not even slightly convincing as an 18 year old). The result of this is that Amell’s character seems like that much more of a jerk, while Whitman’s (tall, slim, classically-all-American-girl-beautiful) friends come off…way, way better than one expects in this kind of movie.

Whitman undergoes far less of a makeover than any other ugly duckling high school film character than I’ve ever seen; the thrust of the movie is clearly intended to be a much stronger be your own bad self and rock it message than anything else, and it’s almost wonderful for it. Unfortunately it’s also staggeringly undercut by the “and also you will totally land the improbably hot guy” aspect, which, I mean, okay, you expect that in this kind of movie, but it was almost so much more.

Ultimately Amell’s character is the one who undergoes the greater transformation, which is also typical of these movies–the love interest comes to realise there’s more than just a pretty face involved–but the boy-next-door thing also kind of undercuts that as well, as does his fraught relationship with the Stereotypically Mean Girl. It’s…

It’s not bad. It’s just…conflicting. Apparently it was adapted from a book written by a 17 year old, and I’m going to have to read the book now to see how it differs.

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1075334 Free Comic Book Day 2015-05-02T15:45:43Z 2015-05-02T15:45:43Z
Ireland isn’t doing very well at spring this year. There was a week of warm afternoons a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been clear a lot, but quite cold. Today it seems to have moved directly into November, with wind and rain and 6°-that-feels-like-0° temperatures.

On top of that, there’s a 48 hour bus strike going on in Dublin this weekend. However, it’s Free Comic Book Day, so I was determined that we were going to Get Out, and so Young Indiana and I went forth to have an Adventure In The Rain.

We exhausted ourselves, actually, hitting two comic shops, going out to lunch, meandering through one of the shopping centres to have a go on several of the coin-operated rides, and finishing up at Chapters Bookstore before staggering (well, taxi-ing) home.

Indy enjoys a drink at Lemon Jelly, our go-to restaurant in Dublin city centre:

Indy and his friend Peter, also known as “Cutie Waiter,” who is the reason Lemon Jelly is our go-to restaurant in Dublin city centre… :) (We referred to Lemon Jelly as “Cutie Waiter’s” for a long time, before we learned Peter’s name. :))

Ride ’em, cowboy!

There’s a new Cinderella’s coach ride at the Ilac Centre!

Indy climbed into the coach, then took my hand and kissed it, “because that’s what Prince Charming does!” OMG. ♥ :)

There’s also a pic of him actually with his free comic book, but I’m waiting for the lads at SubCity to post it. :)

Anyway, we were knackered by the time we got home, but we had a pretty great Adventure In The Rain.

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1075094 Picoreview: A Little Chaos 2015-04-27T14:42:45Z 2015-04-27T14:42:45Z
Picoreview: A Little Chaos: Entirely fictional, but charming.

I mean, entirely fictional: Kate Winslet’s character is an invention, no one like her existed at all, and…I wish they wouldn’t do that. It’s like Disney’s Pocahontas: why drop a couple of historical names on top of characters who live lives completely unlike the real story?

The answer, obviously, is because people recognise names like Pocahontas and Versailles and King Louis, which establishes the story, but…look, Belle was not an entirely accurate telling of Dido Elizabeth Belle, but it gets her story right in broad strokes. Similarly with Carrington (which, if you haven’t seen it, you ought to), both of which prompted me to go look up the real people and learn more about them. Which is what I cheerfully set out to do having watched A Little Chaos, because woman gardener in the court of King Louis XIV!

Except no, she’s completely fictional, and if you invent your main character and thrust her into the middle of a nominally real historical court and a you’re…I don’t know. Telling lies. Which is a silly thing to be offended by in a movie (and I didn’t know until after seeing it that Alan Rickman, who directed it, has been entirely frank about it being, as he said, “deeply historically inaccurate”), but it still irritates me.

None of which has anything to do with the general charm of the movie, which is, in fact, generally charming. Kate Winslet has a backstory that’s a little heavy-handed, and Matthias Schoenaerts, who plays the male lead, has one that’s a little too obscured, but Winslet (who looks gloriously un-made-up) brings her usual appealing steadiness to the character and Schoenaerts has a sort of restrained smoldering thing going on. I rather liked them together, although there were a couple of moments when I did wonder if Winslet was going to run off and have an affair with Alan Rickman’s Louis, whom he played as one of his soft-underbelly sorts, which, er, you know, works for me. :) There are several smaller roles that are especially well played. In fact, I could probably have watched an entire movie about the interactions of the secondary characters. :)

So overall I enjoyed it quite a bit and didn’t get annoyed until I found out after the fact that it was entirely fictional, which I’m sure wouldn’t have bothered me at all if I’d known it beforehand.

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1074732 Five years old. :) 2015-04-27T11:53:44Z 2015-04-27T11:53:44Z
And very excited about it too. Very clear on YESTERDAY he was not yet five, even if we had a birthday party yesterday. (“My birthday celebrated!”) Definitely not five last week when I, being old, started saying he was five. “NOT YET. NOT FOR TWO WEEKS.” (We’re still a little unclear on time. :))

But today, oh my. Today the first words out of his mouth were, “NOW I’m five years old!”

And indeed he is. :)

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1074217 Bewitching Benedict! 2015-04-24T15:44:24Z 2015-04-24T15:44:24Z
Okay, the decision is official: the straight-up Regency romance (no fantasy elements involved!) that I’ve written will be coming your way soon! In July or August, if all goes well!

BEWITCHING BENEDICT is (potentially!) the first of a new 7 book series about the Lovelorn Lads. Think 7 Brides for 7 Brothers meets PG Wodehouse: seven friends (not actually brothers, except in spirit!) attempt to navigate the Regency marriage market, while an interfering valet helps them avoid bad relationships and secure good ones. Hijinks, as they say, ensue. :)

It is, I said modestly, a charming little book. :) I’ve got the production team lined up for it, am working on my first-draft revisions, and will hopefully have it off to the editor by the end of April. I can’t wait to get it out to all of you. I think you’ll like it even if it’s not your usual fare!

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1073931 Picoreview: Age of Ultron 2015-04-23T21:38:45Z 2015-04-23T21:38:45Z
Picoreview: Age of Ultron: We saw it twice in a row.

We were going to ANYWAY, I mean that was our plan, we had tickets for the 10:15am 3D IMAX showing, which was as early as we could see it without going to last night’s midnight showing, and then tickets for a 3:30pm 2D showing, so basically we had time enough to go get lunch and come back to the theatre. And that’s what we were going to do ANYWAY.

But we were also glad we did. :)

First and most importantly, you actually *don’t* need to stay past the first teaser, because there is in fact not a second one, even though they said there wasn’t. :)

Without going into spoiler territory, Paul Bettany is perfect as The Vision. I liked Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver quite a lot, which I had not expected to. Hawkeye had a much more substantial role in this one without anybody else feeling like they’d been shirked. Nearly everybody got some funny bits. Ultron himself was just terrific.

I have some complaints, mind. Although I think Black Widow had very close to the leading amount of screentime, as she did in Avengers: Assemble, and despite the Scarlet Witch’s presence, it felt pretty heavily of Boys’ Club to me. There was a thread that although I liked everyone’s reaction to it, I didn’t like in and of itself. Also, there was not nearly enough half-naked Chris Hemsworth. (What? I think that’s a valid complaint! (In fact, so does Joss Whedon, apparently, as he says an awful lot of shirtless Hemsworth got left on the cutting room floor and will be in the DVD extras. :)))

Overall, though, I thought it was pretty damn solid. It was never going to reach the astonishing joie de vivre of Avengers: Assemble, in part because–like the first X-Men movie–it wasn’t so much a matter of whether Avengers: Assemble was good as the flat-out amazing fact that it didn’t suck. If A:A was a 5, I’d give Age of Ultron a 4; if A:A was a 4, AoU is a 3.5.

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1073814 Writing Wednesdays: Synopses 2015-04-22T18:17:36Z 2015-04-22T18:17:58Z
My latest question from the peanut gallery was about how I write synopses. Or at least, I think that’s what it was about: the entirety of the question, actually, was, “Synopsis?” :)

I’ve talked about writing synopses before at least once, in depth, as part of the Great Plot Synopsis Project (warning: that contains the entirety of the (2 page) synopsis for URBAN SHAMAN, and is therefore spoilery). However, that was written in early 2008, and I have Changed My Process since then.

Specifically, in fact, I’ve changed it in the past couple of years. Some time ago–maybe while writing MOUNTAIN ECHOES–I had an unusually good writing go, because I had an unusually solid idea of what I was doing. The same thing had happened with the Inheritors’ Cycle books, in fact, and I began to have a sneaking suspicion that having a thorough outline might be…*good for me*.

But I used to think that thorough synopses would suck the joy out of writing the actual book. Where’s the mystery! and all that. And, I mean, I knew my process: I would write to roughly the 1/3rd mark and hit a wall. I’d go back and revise, and make my way up to the 2/3rds mark. I’d hit another wall, and revise. Then I’d finish the book, so by the time I reached “the end”, I usually had a pretty darn solid draft.

Except on those three books, that one Walker Papers novel and the two Inheritors’ Cycle books, I really hadn’t hit those walls. I’d really kinda just blown through them, because I knew where I was going. So for four out of my five most recent books I’ve gotten more serious about the process, even though frankly, I hate synopsising.

MAGIC & MANNERS didn’t have an *exhaustive* synopsis, not the level I’ll be talking about next. OTOH, I was following (in large part, anyway) the plot of one of the most successful books ever written in the English language, so, uh. I didn’t really need to break that down too much.

But STONE’S THROE, BEWITCHING BENEDICT (an as-yet un-contracted-for straight-up Regency romance) and REDEEMER have all been synopsised within an inch of their lives. In all three cases I’ve relied heavily on my brainstorming group, and REDEEMER is going to be the most interesting test of this process, because it’s going to be, by a considerable margin, the longest of the three.

STONE’S THROE and BENEDICT were both in the region of 70K and had synopses of around 3K; given that the synopses I’ve sold on and used as my jumping boards for the past decade were generally around 1500 words for 100K books, that’s quite a jump in detail.

(The one book of the five most recent that I didn’t do a really thorough synopsis on was, incidentally, a miserable writing experience. It went through five painful drafts before I got to the end, and although it seems to work I’m still not strictly convinced it does. :[)

So I’ll talk about REDEEMER now. :)

For REDEEMER, I started out with a 1300 word synopsis. That would have been what I’d have sold to a publisher on, but it’s not the level of detail I was going for with this New Improved Process. After the Kickstarter, I picked up at the end of chapter 3 and started a new, more detailed synopsis from there.

Obviously I can’t show you any of this, because it’s full of spoilers, but what happened next was that I wrote an additional 2800 words, the first half of which was something story-oriented and the second half of which devolved into asking questions and trying to answer questions posed by my brainstorming group a long time ago. It’s full of things that are not synopsis at all but are worldbuilding thoughts and ideas.

I then brought that 2800 word mess to my brainstorming group, who threw out suggestions and answers to the questions, raised new ones, and sent me back to the synopsis board with many new thoughts.

The THIRD draft of the synopsis is 6200 (new) words long. It covers some of the same ground from the 2nd draft, has a great deal of random worldbuilding in it as well, and still doesn’t manage to really reach the end of the book. It gets most of the way there and then at the Big Finale it just basically goes SPLAAAAAAAAH I HAVE NO IDEA. I went back to the brainstorming group and frowned hard at commentary and struggled and fought with my brain until I figured it out.

The fourth and final draft of the synopsis finally makes it all the way to the end of the book. Interestingly, the reason I wrote the 4th draft was because I thought I’d be able to use the half-assed mess of a 3rd draft as my outline, but no. I needed it to be more formally, coherently presented in order to get any real use out of it. So it’s 7500 (new, if occasionally revised from previous versions) words long. It works out the action through-line. It works out the emotional through-line. It works out scenes on an (almost, we’ll see how it works out) chapter-by-chapter basis. It sets up points that will spring up in later books. It still asks questions that aren’t answered, but most of them are, and the places where they aren’t, well, that’s the room to breathe. That’s where the story develops in ways that will surprise and interest me.

So that’s 18,000 words I’ve spent wrangling this book into shape. I can literally see in the early versions of the synopsis where I would have had to stop writing the book and go back and fix things, because the questions and plot points that stopped me cold in the *synopsis* would have been at the 1/3rd and 2/3rds point of the book. Doing this has essentially forced me to do all the thinking ahead of time,

But here’s the thing: my average writing speed is about a thousand words an hour. With both BENEDICT and STONE’S THROE, I was hitting 1500-1900 words per hour *regularly*. BENEDICT, including the time writing an exhaustive synopsis, didn’t take more than 70 hours to write.

If this plays out with REDEEMER–and there’s some question with that, because I’m doing a couple of writing things with it that I didn’t/wouldn’t do with BENEDICT or STONE’S THROE–then this is a *hugely* sensible use of my time. It’s taken, I don’t know, 20-30 hours of work on the synopsis, but if I write the book in another 60 or 70? That’s a real win, in terms of time management. So I’m pretty excited to see how it goes, honestly. It’s an adventure!

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1073525 Kitsnacks: Easy Tikka Masala 2015-04-21T17:31:27Z 2015-04-21T17:31:27Z I have semi-invented an easy tikka masala recipe, which is what happens when I have a recipe I've made before but discover I'm missing many of the actually-called-for ingredients. This one ends up having what I trust most people have in their pantries, which is why it's ideal. :)

Easy Tikka Masala
1-2 oz butter or vegetable oil
1 tbsp garlic powder
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp paprika
1/2-1 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp salt
pepper to taste

1 can chopped tomatoes
1 can chickpeas
1 fresh tomato, rough chopped
8 oz cream

Melt the butter in a largish sautee pan (ideally one with a lid). Stir-fry dry ingredients over a medium heat for ~30. Pour the tomatoes in before the spices burn & bring to a simmer. Stir in the cream & bring to a simmer. Add chickpeas and meat, if you're putting meat in. Simmer until the sticky rice has finished cooking. Throw in the fresh tomato at the last possible moment & serve over sticky rice.

I roasted up a leg of lamb and used about half of it in this, with a nice long simmer so it was super tender. It also works well with chicken, and presumably with beef, pork or shrimp, if them's your wish.

This can be made entirely satisfactorily without chickpeas, fresh tomato, or even paprika, but the tomatoes and chickpeas give it a nice heft and freshness. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1073360 Picoreview: Fast & Furious 7 2015-04-20T13:16:14Z 2015-04-20T13:16:45Z
Picoreview: Fast & Furious 7: broke my heart.

I knew it was going to; the goddamn trailers were making me tear up even as I recognized that they were specifically choreographed to. I had no attachment at all to Paul Walker–I think the only thing I’ve seen him in is the F&F movies–but I was shocked by his death because, well. It was shocking. And so messed up, that he’s best known for these fast car movies and then died in a horrific car wreck. So FF7 was always going to break my heart.

And it did. And I’m…glad. Because it should have, because it broke the hearts of everybody making the film, and there are moments where you can see that. I mean, they’re moments where it’s in character and in-story and everything, but one of the underlying things about this franchise that I’ve always loved is how much *fun* they’re having with it.

But there are times in this movie when you can see they’re not having fun at all. Times when they shouldn’t be because of the story, but it also feels strongly like it’s because their friend is dead and it’s just awful. One of those times is one of the few places where I was certain it was one of Walker’s brothers standing in for him, and it made a mess of the scene. There was also one shot where it felt very obvious that there was CGI involved, but I’ve got to say that for the vast majority of the movie I really had no idea if it was Walker or not, and just accepted that it was. And I’m pretty sensitive to CGI, so they’ve done a good job in a dreadful situation.

Horrible coincidence of Walker’s death aside…it’s actually a pretty damn good movie. Too much frenetic music video camera work, but that’s part of the franchise. Arguably too long, but the easiest section to cut is one I can see why they didn’t want to, for purposes of spin-off movies (I do kind of wish Dwayne Johnson would lose some of his size. He’s starting to look bizarrely pin-headed to me.). But it moved quickly and I was, as usual, hanging on the edge of my seat and gnawing my knuckles over the extreme car scenes, and laughing at some clever moments.

Somewhat ironically, though, given how many characters there are in the franchise, I actively missed the ones who are no longer part of it, particularly Gal Godot as Giselle: this felt more like a boy’s club than the F&F movies usually do to me. And it turns out that Gadot and Sung Kang’s Han prevented too much time being spent on Tyrese Gibson’s Roman, who is beautiful but growing somewhat wearing as a character. OTOH, I kind of felt that Chris “Ludacris” Bridges kind of finally came into his own as Tej in FF7, which made up for some of Roman’s tediousness.

Dear God, if there is anything as sexy on this earth as Michelle Rodriguez and Vin Diesel in formal wear, I don’t know what it is, except Michelle Rodriguez in formal wear slit to the thigh so you can see the hardware she’s packing on her way into an epic fight scene. And that’s another thing I love about this series, is that the ladies kick as much ass as the gents. They also introduced a new character (one I would not be surprised to see again) with whom I was *particularly* happy because it went 100% against stereotype–which is, of course, yet another thing I love about this franchise.

That said…I would like this to be the final film. It probably won’t be, but…I’d like it to be. I don’t mind spin-offs with The Rock (and Elena, please let us have more Elsa Pataky as Elena, and indeed, cameos from the original crew would be fine) but I…I’d like the actual F&F franchise to wrap. They’ve handled an awful change in their ranks as well as they possibly could; so well, in fact, that it *feels* final to me. Even though they left themselves an out it’s just…it’s season 5 Buffy or Supernatural. This is where the story ends, even if they don’t stop with it for a long time.

In the unlikely event you haven’t seen it already, you don’t need to stay through the final credits unless you’re like me and need the extra five minutes in the dark theatre to recover from the ugly sobbing. Five minutes wasn’t enough, in fact; I still looked a mess when I left.

I very much want to re-watch the whole series in chronological order now (as opposed to order of release), and then go see FF7 again.

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1072709 Kitsnaps: Zoo Day 2015-04-17T09:59:48Z 2015-04-17T10:04:12Z
Yesterday it was a glorious morning and on the way to preschool Young Indiana said to me, “We should go to the zoo after school on this beautiful day!”

That seemed like a very sensible thing to do, so after school I collected him and we hopped on the bus to, er, actually, to go downtown and then get on the bus to the zoo, because that was by far the easiest way to get there, but, y’know, details details. To go to the zoo. :)

It was in fact a perfectly marvelous day, and I learned something very important, which is that I should not wear my big fashionable vision-correcting sunglasses when shooting with my non-autofocus telephoto lens, because it turns out three quarters of the pictures I take will have the fence behind the animal, or nothing at all, in nice sharp focus. It must have something to do with the distance of the glasses lens from my eye, because usually only about a quarter of my non-autofocus pictures are out of focus. :)

I did, however, get some nice pictures, and am especially pleased with my Babushka gorilla shot.

Babushka gorilla

Babushka gorilla

There’s also a new baby bongo! I love the bongos. Sadly I missed the picture of Daddy Bongo looking like he might charge all of us humans who were looking at his baby (wretched lack of autofocus!), but I got the baby looking pretty belligerent itself, so that works for me. :)

Baby Bongo

Dublin Zoo’s newest baby bongo appears to be feeling a little belligerent.

Just as I was taking this picture of one of the newish redheaded monkeys at the zoo, the baby next to me SQUEALED!, causing the monkey to look sharply in our direction. I said thank you to the baby. :)

Redheaded Monkey

I don’t know what the redheaded monkeys at Dublin Zoo are called. Er, as in their species, although I don’t know their names, either…

I think this is the best picture I’ve managed to take of the white-crowned mangabeys. They move fast!

White-Crowned Mangabeys

My shoddy focusing skills actually worked out just fine with this, as the baby is so nicely in focus even if the mama isn’t! :)

And since it was his idea to go to the zoo, I figure Young Indiana should feature in today’s post. :)

Enthusiastic Primate

I have a lot of out of focus pictures of this enthusiastic primate too, but this one turned out nicely. :)

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1072474 viral! 2015-04-16T21:04:39Z 2015-04-16T21:04:39Z I've had something go viral! I think ~160K reblogs qualifies as viral by anybody's standards. #beams

Look, I'm dorktastic, I knew that already, but it's kinda cool to see something get so many hits. My previous-ever best was several hundred retweets when I bitched about being able to read faster than any news video so please always just GIVE ME A TRANSCRIPT. So this is neat.

Also it makes me wish I posted more original content on Tumblr but I don't so oh well. :) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1072304 Writing Wednesday: Discipline 2015-04-15T15:05:04Z 2015-04-17T10:10:28Z
@kit_flowerstorm on Twitter asks me to discuss how to practice the discipline of writing.

This is a question I get a *lot*. I don’t know if all professional writers get it a lot or if I do because I seem to have a particularly impressive output (or if it’s just that, as I actually *noticed* a few weeks ago, I work a lot).

There is not a romantic answer to this question. The truth is that when writing is your day job, you sit down and (if necessary) struggle for the words just like you might go to a more typical job and struggle through the day, regardless of how much you might not want to. It’s what pays the bills, so it’s what you do.

Furthermore, you know what it takes. It takes sitting down and writing. It takes getting your butt in the chair and your writing instrument to hand and doing it. There’s no romanticism to that either. It takes screwing up more times than you can count and frustration beyond compare and aggravation and polishing and trying to do better, but at the end of the day nothing’s going to come of it if you do not sit down and write.

Those things, however true, are also perhaps not necessarily a very useful answer. This, though, might be:

First, you have to want to write more than you want to do anything else. *Anything* else. You have to want to write more than you want to hang out with your friends. More than you want to sleep, because you can get up an hour early or stay up an hour late and get in a little writing time. More than you want to go to lunch with your coworkers, because you can steal 30, maybe 45 minutes of writing time if you eat a home-made lunch and hide in a corner for the rest of lunch hour and write. More than you want to watch TV or go to the movies; I have a friend who says if you have time to watch TV, you have time to write, and she is absolutely correct.

It’d be good if you don’t want to write more than you want to exercise, because exercising is really good for you and helps clear your head and can make writing easier. So try not to want to write more than you want to exercise, but really, you’ll probably want to write more than you want to exercise.

You have to accept that if you want to write professionally, you’re going to have to treat your writing like it’s a job. It’s not a hobby. It’s a job. It’s almost certainly a job you’re not getting paid for, and if you’re a typical writer, you won’t get paid for it for a long time. I wrote five full length manuscripts and at least two massive partials over the course of a decade before I got a contract. This is pretty normal. You have to be somewhat obsessed to pursue something like that for so long, at the expense of things listed above and things like the things listed above, for so little reward. For possibly *no* reward, because getting published is hard.

But if it’s what you want, if it’s what you really truly desperately deeply want, you will find the discipline to do it. You’ll skip lunches out, you won’t watch tv, you’ll choose to write for another half hour instead of going to the gym (don’t do that, go the gym), you’ll forego sleep in the name of a few more words on the page.

All of this is vastly more difficult if you have a child. If you’re the primary caregiver to a child and you’re trying to write and you find even five minutes to get some words on a page, you are hugely admirable and should be proud of yourself.

You will not always want to write more than you want to do anything else. That need will come and go. You can beat yourself up for it if you want, but honestly it’s better if you try not to. If the real, deep, frustrating desire to write is there, you’ll go back to it after a while. Maybe after a month. Maybe after a year. Maybe after five years. If you don’t feel the pull to go back to it, don’t worry about it. It’ll be okay.

If you do feel the pull, you’re probably a hopeless case, under which circumstances I can tell you that deadlines are possibly the most useful discipline-keeper that I know. I do not believe in the Douglas Adams school of deadlines; I do not enjoy the sound of them whooshing past over my head. Writing groups can be helpful for that, if you’re not good at setting and keeping your own deadlines.

Daily wordcount expectations can be helpful, even if it’s just 100 words. Don’t be overly ambitious with wordcount goals. It’s much, much better to have a tiny goal and over-reach it than a big one you have a hard time reaching and missing a day of which will put you so far behind you give up forever (or at least weeks).

Exercise helps. I swear to God, it really does. Whatever kind works for you, going for a walk, going to the gym, swimming, yoga, whatever. Moving a little bit loosens up everything, including your mind, and it can make it easier to get those words on the page.

But ultimately, y’know, you’ve just got to sit your butt down and do it. I really don’t know any other way.

(x-posted from The Essential Kit) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mizkit:1071994 Good job, Adobe. 2015-04-15T13:51:04Z 2015-04-15T13:51:04Z I've had an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for a few years now, under the monthly subscription where you don't pay for it the months you don't use it, and I tend to use it about...once a month. I sort of realized today how dreadful a scam that was/how much I was paying for it, and went and bought Photoshop Elements, which has really got everything I'm realistically going to use, in order to replace the Creative Cloud subscription.

They made me talk to a customer support person when I tried to cancel, and first they offered me a month's free subscription. I said, "How about you start with a five year free subscription, and then we'll talk?"

They then offered me a reduced plan, half the cost of the subscription I had. I said "Or how about I just pay €72 for something I can use forever?"

Then they said there would be a €150 cancellation fee, and was that okay with me. I said not even slightly. They said I'd been on a yearly subscription and there was a cancellation fee to end it. I pointed out it wasn't a new yearly subscription and I saw no reason why I should pay a fee.

In the meantime I was reporting on all of this via Twitter, because of course I was, and the Adobe customer care people over THERE got involved.

I pointed out that I had *already* bought Elements, and that they were not losing a customer (except they were gonna if this kept up because I have the power of cancelling my own transaction), and that I simply wanted to be a customer on a different level.

Five minutes later both sides of the party, the Twitter and the chat people, had made certain that my Creative Cloud membership was cancelled with no fees.

It would obviously have been better if I hadn't had to go through *any* of that rigamarole, but I'm very pleased with their customer service, which provided me with what I wanted in a reasonably timely manner. And they've made it *far* more likely that I'll straight-up buy any other Adobe products that I might want in the future, which is, you know. GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE.

So good job, Adobe. You did this right.


text:
After impressive debut, Scott Smith open to Strikeforce return

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Middleweight slugger Scott Smith (14-5) has a way of making an introduction.

Just as Smith debuted nine months ago for the now-defunt EliteXC with a knockout win, “Hands of Steel” provided main-event fireworks with a 24-second knockout of Terry Martin (18-6) in his Strikeforce debut at Friday night’s “Strikeforce: Destruction” event in San Jose, Calif.

“I knew I just needed to land one solid punch,” Smith said at the evening’s post-event press conference. “I knew once I landed one punch, [Martin] was going to try to take it to the ground. I wanted to make [the punch] worth it’s while.”

Smith squeezed every bit of worth out of his straight right hand. And when the blow connected flush to his opponent’s temple, Martin dropped immediately to the canvas.

“I had no intentions of throwing any left hooks,” Smith said. “I broke my hand throwing a left hook in my last fight (against Robbie Lawler). I’ve got two screws in my hand right now.

“But for some reason I just felt that left hook, straight-right hand. So I pawed that left hook out there a couple times, and it set it up perfectly. I stepped right in with the right hand.”

Smith took the bout with Martin on very short notice. Smith was originally scheduled to compete under the EliteXC banner on Nov. 8, but the collapse of that organization left the middleweight without a fight. The California resident was relieved that Strikeforce was interested in his services.

“I was supposed to fight Nov. 8 on the Reno card for ProElite,” Smith said. “I found out like two-and-a-half weeks before that the fight got canceled. I was bummed. It’s coming close to the holidays. I’ve got a mortgage. I’ve got kids. I needed that payday before the end of the year.

“My managers said, ‘Just keep on training. We’re going to get you a fight. Don’t worry about it.’ I took the fight off of 10-days’ notice. But I was prepared to fight three weeks ago.”

In the end, Smith believes the additional time off may have actually proved beneficial in the healing process of his broken hand.

“I think the extra two weeks off was probably better for my hand to rest,” Smith said. “I just got cleared Oct. 13 from the doctor to start training again.”

Smith is technically once again on the free agent market. But the UFC, WEC, EliteXC and now Strikeforce veteran would like to earn a return trip to San Jose, Calif.

“Right now it was a one-fight deal because we had to throw it together so fast,” Smith said. “I would love to stick with Strikeforce, especially in this venue. This is an awesome place.”

And if the two parties can strike a deal, Smith believes there are a few interesting fights to make.

“There are a lot of fun fights out there,” Smith said. “Frank Shamrock would be a great fight. Obviously Cung Le. There’s a lot of great 185-pounders out there that would make for a fun fight.

“And like I said (in the cage after the bout), Frank Shamrock called me fat, so I’m mad at him.”

John Morgan is the lead staff reporter for MMAjunkie.com.

blog comments powered by Disqus

The Latest


text:
UFC on FX 5's Formiga says McCall loss led to improvement, expects rematch

With his loss to Demetrious Johnson in the opening round of the UFC’s inaugural flyweight tournament earlier this year, Ian McCall will need at least a few more wins before he gets to challenge for the title.

Jussier Formiga (14-1 MMA, 0-0 UFC), meanwhile, hopes a win over John Dodson (13-5 MMA, 2-0 UFC) at tonight’s UFC on FX 5 event leads him to a date with champ Johnson.

At some point, though, Formiga expects he’ll fight McCall, who was the first and only fighter to defeat the UFC newcomer.

Formiga, who’s on the FX-televised main card of tonight’s UFC on FX 5 event at Minneapolis’ Target Center, is in a title eliminator. He or Dodson will get the first shot at Johnson, who recently won the UFC flyweight title with a victory over Joseph Benavidez.

But don’t count out McCall, Formiga warns. He knows just how good he is. In fact, were it not for Formiga’s early-2011 decision loss to McCall at Tachi Palace Fights 8, he may not be the fighter he is today.

“I think it was a great fight,” Formiga told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). “I enjoyed it. It was also a good experience for me. It was only my second fight in the U.S., and I wasn’t packing much muscle comparatively. I used to walk around 132 pounds or so.

“But that’s no excuse. Ian McCall is a great fighter. I think on that day I won the first round, he dominated in the second round, and the third round was somewhat uneventful except for when I took him down. But it’s no use complaining. He had home advantage. He did his job. I expect we’ll face each other again.”

Formiga, who now walks around at about 143 pounds, makes a highly anticipated UFC debut on the strength of a five-fight win streak, the past four of which came via submission. Before the loss to McCall, which came six years after the Brazilian’s 2005 pro debut, Formiga widely was regarded as the flyweight division’s top-ranked fighter. With a win over Dodson, who won “The Ultimate Fighter 14″ as a bantamweight before a return to the flyweight division, Formiga could get the chance to reclaim that ranking with a win over Johnson.

For now, he thinks Dodson will prepare him well for UFC-caliber competition.

“He’s great for sure,” Formiga said. “It’s a great debut for me, to be going such a strong and fast opponent. Also, he’s well-known in the U.S. He seems like a humble guy at the same time. He’s also a southpaw and likes to stand. He’s a great wrestler. I think he must have some good submission skills. So this will be a great fight since we’re so well matched.”

In preparation of the fight, Formiga has been working with training partners such as UFC interim champ Renan Barao, Johnny Eduardo and Marlon Sandro down in Brazil. But he still points to the McCall loss as a catalyst for improvement.

“I learned a lot from that defeat,” he said. “I grew a lot both physically and mentally since. If I hadn’t lost maybe I wouldn’t be as strong today.”

For more on UFC on FX 5, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.

blog comments powered by Disqus

The Latest