Dry

Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to dry his clothes.

This yearning made the last owners of this apartment put up a standard Ikea clothes cabinet in the bathroom with a heater in a cage at the bottom.

Which is ok.

But.

Look at these … thingies I’m supposed to hang the clothes to dry on:

They are short and pointy.  They’re too short to hang a t-shirt over.

If I hang a t-shirt that way, the pointy end makes a really noticeable and semi-permanent bulge in the t-shirt.  So I have to fold them, which makes a crease in the drying shirt.

I just canna be done!

(And if you’re about to suggest that I should use a dryer to dry t-shirts that have prints on them, there’s only one possibly answer: Sirrah, I’m not an animal!)

So I’ve been trying to come up with a way to alter this thing into something usable.

Ideally, I would have liked to have wider, non-metal … sticks … sticking out of the cupboard.  But I couldn’t really see a way to do that that would be nice.  Fastening … sticks … to the back of the cupboard would be doable, but making them stick out in a predictable fashion seems quite difficult, if I want to use the entire depth of the cupboard.  And I have to, otherwise they won’t be long enough to hang stuff.

So I came up the the brilliant idea of just buying a bunch of broomsticks and mounting them the other way.

Saw saw saw:

Drill baby drill.  I ran out of the fastener things, though, so I couldn’t get all the broomstick handle thingies up.  There’s a chain store here that sells just the right kind, and I emptied out the stock from three different branches.  I mean.  Don’t they get people making drying cabinets from broomstick handles every day?  Some chains are just so inconsiderate.

Look!  Clothes!  Drying!

It works!

I mean…

1995: The Zanzibar Cat

I’m not a fan of short story collections, but I’m a fan of a number of authors who write one short story collection after another, so I read them anyway.

But that explains why this book went unread.  I really like Joanna Russ.  She’s very funny and she’s quite angry, which makes for an enjoyable reading experience.

This collection has lots of funny bits, and lots of very sf-ey bits, and I enjoyed it immensely. I read it (as I do most short story collections) while travelling, and the mixture of storytelling approaches fits that situation perfectly.

As with any other book that I like, after finishing it, I went online to buy other books by the same author that I hadn’t read yet.  (This is why the backlog grows.) 

Not only have I read all her books, but she died last year.

Sigh.

Anyway, I bought this paperback used.  I like used books with marks from previous owners.  Like this:

I don’t leave any marks in my book myself, though.

Rating: Terrifilicious.

Tumblr is on Acid

I was reading this story on Hacker News about how awesome Tumblr is. 

It’s kinda fascinating.  It seems like lots of people on Tumblr is extremely rah rah about Tumblr itself.  You don’t really see people on Blogger or WordPress yattering on about the platform.

But I created a tumblr myself a while back to post even randomer pictures and stuff.

And the sign-up process is a complete mess that I still don’t remember how I got through in the end, involving emails that contained links to nowhere.

And the user interface is a total clusterfuck.  As illustrated in the picture above, if I want to post a picture to my tumblr, I have about one pixel where I’m able to click to upload a picture.  (Granted, this is from a pretty weird laptop with a 1600×768 screen, but still…)

And after I’ve uploaded it, there’s no easy way to get a direct link to the post itself.

So it’s all very confusing.  Are the rah rah tumbler people on acid?

Either I’m missing something, or the entire UX is totally eww.

Perhaps I’ll give hipstagram a try…

1995: The Mark of Merlin

I bought this book at an SF auction thing at the University.  I remember a bidding war broke out between me and some woman over this book.

I’m not sure why.  I was just caught up in the excitement.

And then it sat on the bookshelf until now.

I used to read a lot of the Anne McCaffrey sf/fantasy stuff.  She’s not a good writer or anything, but her books are…  relaxing.  They’re just there.  Things happen.  Dragons fly by.  A spaceship rebels. 

This isn’t a fantasy book, though.  “Merlin” (he of the title) is a dog.

I mean, literally.  He’s a dog.

So is this book.  This books is literally a dog.

It’s an uneasy mash-up between a gothic romance book and a spy adventure book, and it fails pretty much completely in every conceivable manner.  The plot is moronic and the romance is icky.

Rating: Twaddlelific!

Papp László Budapest Sportarénában

Who knew that Dead Can Dance had so many fans in Hungary that they had to play a sports arena?

I thought the sound was gonna be pretty iffy, but it was the last place in Europe that had tickets available.

The sound wasn’t iffy — it was horrible.

As Concert Goer Guy would say: Worst.  Echo.  Ever.

It was still ridiculously beautiful.  It’s Dead Can fucking Dance, innit?