Hurray for Tower Books' 30% off sale! I bought two new paperbacks. One is the 7th Babylon 5 novel and one is alternative history detective fiction set in Raphael's Italy by Paul McAuley. They look great. I'm still struggling with a history of the War of the Roses but I'm frankly bogging down. All those Joans, Henrys, Katherines, and Edwards confuse me. I've never been especially interested in medieval history or literature. I've been gradually working backwards in time from a fascination with the 1920's to the 1880's to a love affair with the English Regency (1811-1820) to adoring all things French and 18th century. The Renaissance is pushing it a bit, but I'll give this McAuley novel a try. It's an intriguing premise.
Most of my friends were at Westercon in Seattle this weekend, soaking up bon mots from J. Michael Straczynski and enjoying the regional science fiction convention. Some of the people from ElderMOO met for the first time. I am hoping this went well. You never really know, of course, but so far everyone I liked online I also liked a lot offline. I thought I might regret not going (not that I had the choice) but I did not. I was perfectly satisfied to stay home, watch fireworks, eat barbque, and crash my computer.
I've been trying to compose an archival list of Macintosh fonts but I keep getting distracted or mildly discouraged. First of all, there's already four very good and complete archives for almost all freeware and shareware fonts on the net: Font Fairy, Fontaholics, Amphigorey, and Fontasia. Second, I bounce between downloading fonts and using them in new and weird ways. Third, as I mentioned, I can't seem to find a font utility program that isn't vastly expensive, and although it looks like I have ATM it won't load so I guess it's horked. And fourthly, maybe I'm the only person who'd like to have an archive that states whether a site has any Mac TT or Type 1 fonts on it.
Anyway, I kept busy all weekend puttering on my font archive project and so I didn't much mind not being in Seattle. That sounds good, doesn't it? The truth is, I get very unhappy after going to Seattle or San Francisco. It just hurts so much that I don't live there anymore. I've deliberately kept down my visits, taking vacations to other cities or out of the country instead. Maybe someday I won't mind so much. Maybe if we move to a more congenial place I won't feel so displaced and out of sync.
I don't know. I just don't know. Better to lose myself in projects and books, and wait for the future to arrive.
