Journal

Saturday, February 11, 2006

dreadlines

Today I crunched through the snow down to the gazebo in the bottom of the garden and scribbled -- I roughed out an article for the Guardian on the odd relationship between films and comics, that persisted in being a shapeless bunch of jottings no matter what I scribbled, I mapped out the plot of most of Eternals #1 as a sort of page-by-page-breakdown but didn't quite finish it, and I wrapped up an extremely long short story that's part of The Graveyard Book that I now need to type up and do a second draft on, while also getting comments in from people on the rough draft short film script that I finished the first draft of the other night...

It's the whole thing of deadlines being cowards, and not spacing themselves out sensibly, but hiding behind things and leaping out at people all at once.

Oh well. I should be used to it by now. And I hope the Guardian article will behave tomorrow.

For now, I can report that the Slingbox is indeed a remarkable toy and a wonderful one, and it works as advertised -- I was lucky enough to have an ethernet connection near the TIVO, which meant setting the Slingbox up was relatively easy (except for having to figure out how to open a specific port in the router, which actually was very simple except for me somehow deleting the house's internet service on the way, but I fixed it), and I can now watch my TV (and more importantly, control and watch whatever's on the TIVO) from anywhere in the world I can get a decent internet connection.

Or in the corner of this computer screen. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10546353/ for more info.)

Having said that, I tend not to miss American TV in the same way I miss UK TV, and so as soon as I had the Slingbox set up I started fantasising about setting up a TIVO-equivalent and a Slingbox in the house of someone in the UK with broadband who wouldn't mind a small heap of electronics in the corner; and then I began wondering how long it would be before someone filled warehouses around the world with cheap hard disks and slingbox-like gadgets and allowed you to subscribe to whatever TV you wanted from wherever in the world...

I meant to post a link to some wonderful cartoons at http://www.truthandbeautybombs.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=4997 -- Garfields with all the animal dialogue gone, transformed into a perfectly paced, rather sad strip about a man whose life is wasted and a cat who says nothing, but they seem to be vanishing from the page...