Maru's Mun Journal

From the Department for Silly Lurgies:
I have the Turbo Cold, I think. Yesterday around lunchtime, I started feeling a scratch in my throat, last night when I came home I felt feverish and woozy, after a nap my throat really hurt and I needed sage and honey tea while unable to eat, then around midnight my brain and throat cleared up while my nose started running, now throat and nose are mostly fine and I started a little cough. This is a week's progress on a non-accelerated cold, within 24 hours. I guess I'll keep coughing slightly for a day or two (coughs stay for a while after the rest of the lurgy is gone), and then the thing will be history.

From the Department of Silly Gadgets:
I just got my laptop cooling pad. It does work, at least with the EEE. It's a little tilted raised platform with no-slip rubbery leg things, and three computer fans. It came quite cheap. It does cause a constant hum, but that's a small price to pay for having my valuable machinery cooled down while in use. I'll now turn off the EEE and try it with my main computer. Which I need anyway to make a 'secret' graphic or two for today's DE...

From the Political Department:

There's an interesting article in Telepolis about the perspectives arising from the elections in the USA:
http://www.telepolis.de/deutsch/inhalt/mein/18755/1.html

And because it's an article written by an American living in Germany, there is actually an English language version online as well, so everybody who's interested can partake of the intellectual challenge and diversity that is Telepolis, for once:
http://www.telepolis.de/english/inhalt/co/18754/1.html

And the title page of the current SPIEGEL:



From the Department for Systematic Madness:

There is a web site that lists conspiracy theories, all and any conpiracy theories, and allows them to make their cases. The PHP system doesn't quite run ideally, yet, but the content is fun:
http://www.weltverschwoerung.de

(in German only, sorry!)


From the Department for Weather Madness:

Our RL weather seems inspired by the early winter we've been having in Bonk in the discworld_rpg. Today, when I rode the train to work, the weather was fine here in Haidhausen, started to drizzle in Berg-am-Laim; there was a hailstorm in Trudering, a snowstorm in Gronsdorf, falling snow in Haar and nothing again in Vaterstetten where I had to get off. My bike's saddle was a bit wet, that was all. But for tonight, frost is predicted, and snow might actually stay on the ground. And it's only November 9th! That's what I get for going on and on about the snowfalls in Bonk.

fabulous_papaya, please let's go on about the thaw that follows soon, as soon as Otto is through with his werewolves!


From the Department for Creative Redirect:

I can still draw, I find! I have done the drawing of young!Sam I wanted to do for dreamkin, and then I've drawn a new little vampire about whom I totally don't know who he could be; suggestions are welcome!

The usual: the iconses are free for gackage if I get credited, and link to a large version of the drawings while a small version is behind the cut that follows:


( Both pictures are behind this cut as well! )


From the Department for Standing Offers:

I've got a few requests for Hogswatch fics yet, but if anybody would like to have something written, the offer is still open! You tell me the particulars, and I'll do it, as long as it's a fandom I know.

From the Department of Literary Pimpage and Enthusiasm:

If you like words that capture a world, and are willing to read something that neither contains a fandom nor a plot but is simply a vignette, a short piece of utter and admirable Literature with a Capital L, you need to read what John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith aka Ji wrote. I have no idea where she took the subject from, but what she writes is the truth - I lived that sort of life from 1997 to 2002 and am eternally grateful that circumstances conspired to allow me to free myself from it and be myself again. I don't know if there's a comm where one reports LJ entries suspected of Literature, Poetry, and The Transpersonal Truth, but this should go there.

From the Library Department:

I got "Monstrous Regiment" back!!! I had to go meet the fellow who'd borrowed it and taken it to the Canary islands at the Spanish-speaking baptist church here in Munich, but I've got my book back!! Now I can read up on the canon for:

oliverperks

maladict_

lofty_hush

tonker

to say nothing of the additional canon for

les_mots_justes

and

ottochriek

YAY!!!!


From the Department for Religious Experiences

So, as I was fetching my book from that Baptist place, I felt compelled to stay - it would have been so impolite to just go. I find Baptists a bit odd, especially after having become accustomed to Orthodoxy. Liturgy as such is yuck for them, it appears. There was some fellow who prayed, first, and people raised their hands and read quotes from their own bibles they had brought with them. Baptists really thumb bibles, I noticed; it's not just a phrase. Then there was a part with a band that sang rousing songs of a very modern and Latin Pop sort of way, and the congregation sang along, swayed with the music, clapped and generally behaved as if at a pop concert. Part three: a sermon of 45 minutes' duration during which people looked up the verses quoted in their own bibles (more thumping, that is). And all of it in Spanish. There was a very modern translation system with wireless headphones, but the interpreter was a rank amateur. But as my derived-from-Latin understanding of Spanish wasn't enough for the sermon, I tried to follow, and developed a monumental headache. After that, coffee. I don't really subscribe to all that stuff the fellow said (after all, I've got Orthodox leanings if any religion at all), but there was one good quote from some religious writer: "If two people have exactly the same opinion in every aspect, one of them is superfluous." Harsh, but to the point, and so in favour of all kinds of diversity. After the Lutheran confirmation last week in Berlin, and this Baptist do, I urgently need an Orthodox liturgy next week, and then perhaps no church at all any more for a while, thank you? nazgul_nr_5, you get to pick whether Russian or Greek. The Greeks sell the nicer icons, but cycling out into the woods to the Russians, and having to wear headscarves, has a certain something as well. Not to mention their otherworldly music.

From the Department of Meeting Fictional People in Real Life

Afterwards, at the coffee in that Baptist church (my, do they brew strong and very good coffee - my headache was gone the monent I got to smell the stuff!!), there was an  RL instance of Mr Pointy who played the piano at us. No, really, totally an incarnation of thetomjon. Or rather, to be even more precise, he was like a young version of tvitoller from the AU on greatestjournal.com. Pinstripe suit, long, straight pony tail, totally skinny and pointy, very polite and incredibly nice to everybody. No idea what in blazes he was doing there; perhaps he came for the coffee, which was really good enough for the AU version of TJ. He took a turn at the piano in the room where we'd repaired to to have our coffee and look at holiday pics on my friend's computer in a bevvy of enthusiastic Argentinian ladies whom I hadn't met before but who knew my friend and his family and instantly loved me as well. I was sekritly and mightily amused and thanked Mr Pointy very politely for the music, which of course he claimed was nothing, he had really hoped the room would already be empty, yadda yadda...

From the department for Technological Maintenance:
I have just brushed an ounce or so of oily black burnt dust from the fan of my dear little foldup computer. It so does breathe easier now. And the power supply doesn't grow hot any more. Am much relieved it wasn't anything worse. It would have so not done to have it break down on me when I - hopefully - log with Frarsie, Shivvie and Jill sometime this weekend.

Erm, and gabby_2600, I am serious about logging from the Stone Inn. I've tried the murk, and it works very well. Mirc is much improved since I first encountered it somewhere around 1996. But do you think I could have logs from the server as well if I tell precisely you when it was afterwards? Just to be on the safe side? As our DSL connection is a bit flaky at times these recent weeks - "damn and blast T-Offline, the words coming easily from long habit" (Douglas Adams, only he said British Telecom, of course.). What with two Australians and one American and me in that RPG thing, we need to be a bit spotaneous.

I am so grateful Gabby said I can use the Stone Inn for that; I would never get all of them safely onto murk. Murk works very well, but is so not for the uninitiated.

From the department of Discworld RPG Madness:
I am so enjoying myself being pteppicymon to Frarsie's wonderfully laid-back Chidder (not_a_pirate) in the discworld_rpg.  It is rather intense at the moment,  as I'm something of a "method writer" (as in "method actor"; I can't do distance, as I said by EMail to schiarire). I filter the energy of any character or story through my own systems.

And then there's margolotta, who's become quite a fixture in Ankh-Morpork and is getting rather worried about it, as she means to return to Bonk soon, or at least eventually. And then there's b-vurdy Gimel. Urgs! I needed names for random vampire ladies, and unwisely called one of them Gimel Metatronim. And did she ever cross over into the Ankh-Morpork of our RPG! She's everywhere by now, and doing the Loose Siege Engine thing as an NPC through many of the RPG LJs and the loggage. If there's a Storm fan here who knows Discworld as well and has time on her hands to play and needs her brain eaten for a while, here is a character who so needs to be taken in hand...

From the Personal Department:
"Watership Down" has arrived!! I am reading it to little Paul from next door every evening now, after tekalynn mentioned a while back she'd loved it when she was seven. Paul is almost nine now. Frithrah, does he enjoy that book! It's a fat book, 650 pages in German, but we've already done a tenth. We'll do all those pages in a jiffy. Especially as Angela, Paul's mother, occasionally reads chapters to him at bed-time as well. I've reserved the chapters with El-ahrairah in them for myself, though.
Angela suspects me to be in love, heh! It's only the energy from the RPG in my system, though. It runs off into RL. Is welcome, too. It's spring, and instead of being tired, I am the most energetic I have been for a long, long time. I find myself being nice to my colleagues, even, and not at all angry at having to work. Work just happens naturally these days.