Slight Sigh of Relief
Jan. 18th, 2006 10:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_rose(Taking a break from work as the Stupid data entry program that can delete all your prior work with one keystroke out of place -- and has no adequate save fuction for work in progress -- just deleted all my work. On the end of page 3 of 4 pages of entry columns. Frustration out, LJ babble in.)
Colin put a second hard drive in my computer, and through that checked out my old hard drive. It was messed up, but not, it seemed, irredeemably. My brother gave him a program he'd tried to use when he had a recent hard drive crash, also due to a defragging (It - the retreival program - didn't work for him, but he thought it was for other reasons). It seems to be working, as apparantly the main thing to get messed up was the directory and the names which let you find the files. We'll see, but it sounds like the main problem from this point is going to be going through and renaming all my writing files coherently, instead of as "File01", etc.
If this is indeed a correct assessment, I may not have to do any rewriting, thoguh the work involved sounds blindingly boring.
Must remember. Backups are my friend.
Other notes:
- I am exceedingly sore today. Being the least sick of the people in the house, and in need of an outlet for computer-related frustration, I shovelled the walks, much of the back porch, and the driveway yesterday. Colin still feels like crud, while I, aside from the bit of fuzziness Monday night, have had nothing more than a slight cough to contend with.
- Colin has been collecting Veronica Mars Season Two through BitTorrent -- which may be technically illegal, but since we don't get any tv reception worth noting and don't have cable, it's the only way that doesn't involve waiting until the DVD et comes out (Which I will buy, if nobody buys it for me). So we've been alternating watching old Doctor Who (Finished what we had of Troughton and Pertwee, and into T. Baker) with new Veronica Mars.
The Old Doctor Who amuses me, as it relates directly to two recent Net conversations.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sartorias recently asked about compelling titles, versus poor titles. Sorting through the old tapes as I was, I kept running across prime examples of "What not to do". Robots of Death. City of Death. The Android Invasion. The Deadly Assassin (Is there another kind?) There are some better ones peppered in the middle, but sadly, the quality of the title does not correspond to the quality of the individual storyline. it would be terribly nice if the wince factor for the title were an indicator of the watchability.
The other thing I've been thinking about is their special effects. Notoriously cheap, notoriusly cheesy. Yet. Sometimes, in the better written episodes, the power of the stroyline drags you past that. And it occurred to me that in most cases, the effects were only there to give you an idea what the real thing is supposed to look like, as is done in theatre, rather than to be the thing itself, as most modern movies try so hard to do. Rather like this comment from Teresa's post at Making Light: It’s like what Patrick said when he first saw Alex Ross’s art: “This is what I saw in my head when I read comics as a kid.”
Thus they may have the Loch Ness monster mostly played by an animatronic head with a very limited range of movements, and a hint of claw and back to let you know the rest of the beast is there, and some jerky stop-motion... and what you see in memory is a long slinky saurian beast, stalking like a tiger but with the rippling motion of a snake.
As long as the storyline convinces. When *that* fails, then it's time to let loose and poke serious fun at the effects.
Colin put a second hard drive in my computer, and through that checked out my old hard drive. It was messed up, but not, it seemed, irredeemably. My brother gave him a program he'd tried to use when he had a recent hard drive crash, also due to a defragging (It - the retreival program - didn't work for him, but he thought it was for other reasons). It seems to be working, as apparantly the main thing to get messed up was the directory and the names which let you find the files. We'll see, but it sounds like the main problem from this point is going to be going through and renaming all my writing files coherently, instead of as "File01", etc.
If this is indeed a correct assessment, I may not have to do any rewriting, thoguh the work involved sounds blindingly boring.
Must remember. Backups are my friend.
Other notes:
- I am exceedingly sore today. Being the least sick of the people in the house, and in need of an outlet for computer-related frustration, I shovelled the walks, much of the back porch, and the driveway yesterday. Colin still feels like crud, while I, aside from the bit of fuzziness Monday night, have had nothing more than a slight cough to contend with.
- Colin has been collecting Veronica Mars Season Two through BitTorrent -- which may be technically illegal, but since we don't get any tv reception worth noting and don't have cable, it's the only way that doesn't involve waiting until the DVD et comes out (Which I will buy, if nobody buys it for me). So we've been alternating watching old Doctor Who (Finished what we had of Troughton and Pertwee, and into T. Baker) with new Veronica Mars.
The Old Doctor Who amuses me, as it relates directly to two recent Net conversations.
sartorias recently asked about compelling titles, versus poor titles. Sorting through the old tapes as I was, I kept running across prime examples of "What not to do". Robots of Death. City of Death. The Android Invasion. The Deadly Assassin (Is there another kind?) There are some better ones peppered in the middle, but sadly, the quality of the title does not correspond to the quality of the individual storyline. it would be terribly nice if the wince factor for the title were an indicator of the watchability.The other thing I've been thinking about is their special effects. Notoriously cheap, notoriusly cheesy. Yet. Sometimes, in the better written episodes, the power of the stroyline drags you past that. And it occurred to me that in most cases, the effects were only there to give you an idea what the real thing is supposed to look like, as is done in theatre, rather than to be the thing itself, as most modern movies try so hard to do. Rather like this comment from Teresa's post at Making Light: It’s like what Patrick said when he first saw Alex Ross’s art: “This is what I saw in my head when I read comics as a kid.”
Thus they may have the Loch Ness monster mostly played by an animatronic head with a very limited range of movements, and a hint of claw and back to let you know the rest of the beast is there, and some jerky stop-motion... and what you see in memory is a long slinky saurian beast, stalking like a tiger but with the rippling motion of a snake.
As long as the storyline convinces. When *that* fails, then it's time to let loose and poke serious fun at the effects.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-01-18 06:48 pm (UTC)And I am glad to hear that there may be better news on the hard drive front.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-18 07:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-19 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-19 06:14 pm (UTC)