Trivial Pursuits

"It was a crime at the time, but the laws we changed 'em."

All of a sudden, I seem to have become wildly enamored of The New Pornographers.

blithely posted by Martin Marks at 10:10 in the evening // three comments by:

• Remi
• Martin
• Martin

I'm in training for the Badass Games.

Yesterday I made rubber; today I make bread. I've never done it all by hand before; I don't think I realized exactly what I was committing to when I first put the Saccharomyces cerevisiae in the lukewarm water, but I'm about halfway through now and so far it doesn't appear I've screwed anything up too badly. Unfortunately, I only have one bread pan and two loaves worth of dough... but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Cooking—baking in particular—seems to be my new hobby. It's tastier than writing, the results are less abstract, and it doesn't tire the brain so mercilessly. More to the point, I've never heard of anyone suffering baker's block. Anyway, chicks dig it. (Right?) It's funny, because the only things I actually have in my fridge, more or less, are bread products. Two loaves of preservative-free bread are absolutely the last things I need right now. But it is relaxing.

quintessentially posted by Martin Marks at 8:56 in the evening // nine comments by:

• Tori
• Martin
• Martin
• Libby
• anne
• Martin
• Moss
• Tania
• Erika

I excreted a latex-bearing sap!

Today I made rubber! How cool is that?

adverbially posted by Martin Marks at 12:40 in the afternoon // comment? by:

NOT A VIKING

Joss Whedon has gone temporarily—but creatively!—insane. (And there's more! Also, more!)

(Via his Lorefulness.)

venturesomely posted by Martin Marks at 8:39 in the evening // one comment by:

• Libby

Because it's completely useless to me.

A present for Mac-user writers out there. (WriteRoom in particular strikes me as potentially a very good thing.) With my own personal favorite word processor for fiction—RoughDraft—now in its third year without an update, I almost find myself wishing I had a Mac.

pretentiously posted by Martin Marks at 8:09 in the evening // four comments by:

• Tim
• Martin
• Fafner
• Martin

Hooray for impulse consumption!

God help me, I just ordered HBO. You can probably guess why. If it weren't for the free video on demand feature, I would have been able to resist. Whatever, man, I have a job, right? I can indulge if I want to.

absentmindedly posted by Martin Marks at 5:00 in the afternoon // one comment by:

• Martin

"I seem to be having tremendous difficulties with my lifestyle..."

I've been having a weekend of moderate frustrations. Except all the things that should have been frustrating, they weren't for some reason.

begrudgingly posted by Martin Marks at 4:57 in the afternoon // one comment by:

• Martin

Not out loud, fortunately.

Wow. Did I seriously just come up with a medieval Persian poetry joke?

absentmindedly posted by Martin Marks at 10:17 in the evening // comment? by:

We are not a-Mused.

It's not writer's block, it's a sympathy strike.

cannily posted by Martin Marks at 10:26 in the evening // one comment by:

• Tanya

(As opposed to lintels.)

I just discovered that for the past two years my company has been paying for a hell of shiny web host, despite the fact that until I just now fixed it, our web site claimed we sold lentils. PHP 5.2.5, baby! That's not even been out two months! Poor hobbes is still stuck in the fours! And yet we still have a corporate web site with all the keywords in two-point font the same color as the background at the bottom of the page to fool freaking AltaVista.

wantonly posted by Martin Marks at 10:44 in the evening // two comments by:

• Moss
• Martin

Sentence of the Day:

trepidatiously posted by Martin Marks at 9:34 in the evening // one comment by:

• Neil