Talking with a friend of mine from a MUCK I frequent. She's an English major and one of the funniest, sexiest people I have ever met, with an amazing command of the language. (Yes, I want her in the worst way, but I don't expect that to go anywhere IRL since she lives halfway across the continent.) What are we talking about? Well, I got all excited about Inform 7 a while back because of the natural language coding and excellent IDE. And I decided to do an interactive fiction project in Inform 7. (I'd wanted to do one for a while now, but Inform 6 was too intimidating.) The thing is, I have zero motivation for doing work without pay or other incentive, and as much fun as I expect to have in the process of making this thing, it's still work. Plus I'm not good at translating ideas into fully-fleshed form. Which is where she comes in. Not only does she provide motivation for me to work on it (to spend time with her, for one thing), but also between my ideas, coding, and writing, and her ability to come up with more concrete visualizations of those ideas, ideas of her own, and her phenomenal English skillz... well, it should be quite a dynamic. Assuming she's up for it, and it's starting to sound like she is.
Other thought:
I keep passing Midway Book as I bus various places. It's a great, three floor bookstore, used and new, all sorts of goodies to explore. Very independent. They used to have a great sprawling tabbycat that wandered the store and made friends. Or, more often, curled up on something and waited for people to come to her. She was rather rotund. I am very much a fan of the bookstore cat.
Anyhow. I like them a bunch...but. They have signs adamantly campaigning against light rail now. I guess they're worried about losing their parking. Which...well...they don't HAVE parking. They're right on the corner of a major intersection. Sure, across the way there's a huge parking lot for the mall opposite them, but I'm not sure why light rail would do much to that. And what they seem to be missing is that while they might lose some tiny amount of parking somewhere, light rail going by them would make it so, so much easier for *everyone* to get to them. Blah.
(In case you can't tell, I'm a big supporter of light rail. I'm confined to public transportation for the foreseeable future, and I don't much like cars to begin with. Therefore, anything that improves on that system makes my life significantly easier. The problem so far is that the only light rail line they've built to my knowledge connects downtown Minneapolis (where I never go), the Mall of America (where I never go), and the airport (where I've gone maybe four times in the last 16 years. Well, maybe a few times more than that, but usually I get rides to and from the airport, anyhow. I've only used light rail two or three times out of at least eight trips to or from the airport.). I would therefore immensely support light rail on Snelling or University, where it would be useful.)
Other thought:
I keep passing Midway Book as I bus various places. It's a great, three floor bookstore, used and new, all sorts of goodies to explore. Very independent. They used to have a great sprawling tabbycat that wandered the store and made friends. Or, more often, curled up on something and waited for people to come to her. She was rather rotund. I am very much a fan of the bookstore cat.
Anyhow. I like them a bunch...but. They have signs adamantly campaigning against light rail now. I guess they're worried about losing their parking. Which...well...they don't HAVE parking. They're right on the corner of a major intersection. Sure, across the way there's a huge parking lot for the mall opposite them, but I'm not sure why light rail would do much to that. And what they seem to be missing is that while they might lose some tiny amount of parking somewhere, light rail going by them would make it so, so much easier for *everyone* to get to them. Blah.
(In case you can't tell, I'm a big supporter of light rail. I'm confined to public transportation for the foreseeable future, and I don't much like cars to begin with. Therefore, anything that improves on that system makes my life significantly easier. The problem so far is that the only light rail line they've built to my knowledge connects downtown Minneapolis (where I never go), the Mall of America (where I never go), and the airport (where I've gone maybe four times in the last 16 years. Well, maybe a few times more than that, but usually I get rides to and from the airport, anyhow. I've only used light rail two or three times out of at least eight trips to or from the airport.). I would therefore immensely support light rail on Snelling or University, where it would be useful.)
tororo:
Hi, Malkavian brother!