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The Story of Mizkit’s Downtime
Is too much. I sum up.
Stupidity. Rampant, rampant stupidity.
The slightly longer version is that due to Reasons, I believed that mizkit.com was registered through one domain registrar when she was in fact registered through another. When her time was up, I paid the bill at Registar One, only to find out too late that I should’ve been paying it at Registrar Two. By that time, Registrar One, who are a bunch of f*ckers (do not, for the love of god, use Jumpline) had set up mizkit.com as an ad farm run by one of their partners–a partner which they repeatedly informed me they couldn’t affect anything with.
Anyway, the site name went to auction, my friends Fred and Laura *completely saved my ass* on it, because I was paralyzed with grief and rage over the whole thing, and after three full months of nonsense I (re: Laura) was able to get mizkit back up on a different server which is now her forever home.
I’d had thoughts of relaunching with a new design, but upon her resurrection, I discovered that the reason I haven’t redesigned mizkit.com in three years is not just exhaustion or laziness, but that I really, really love the design elements here. So I canned the design I had in the wings and am trying to do something else with the same Chance image. There are modern web design functions I really want to incorporate, so there *will* be a redesign coming soon, but for the moment I’m just going to be incredibly, incredibly grateful I’ve got my web home back. I’ve been mizkit online for 20 years. I was *destroyed* when I thought I’d lost her, and I’m so, so glad to have her back.
Wee clickable mockup of the possible redesign behind the break.
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all the social activity!
In the past month I’ve had, and I’m really only barely exaggerating, as much social activity as I normally encounter in a year. First was DICE, the comic-con, then a weekend off, then Octocon, then this weekend our friends Alan and Colette were over for our other friends Brian and Shevy’s wedding. A&C came by and, er, well, helped me clean house on Frida, for which they were duly rewarded with gumbo and brownies, and for which I am eternally grateful. We can actually use our dining room table now. And we have more DVDs ripped than we did, and all the downstairs boxes are unpacked, and it’s just so much better there are almost no words for it. Sing praises unto them, because they are worthy of praise!
Then the wedding yesterday was wonderful and full of joy (and Ted and I left early, therefore missing what has been reported as the best mother-in-law speech of all time, and the best man’s blessing done in Klingon), and we saw a number of other friends whom we often only see at conventions. At one point the groom was overheard to say, “It *is* just like a convention, but with only all my favorite people!” (He got the funny line in the vows, too, after Shevy had given hers, and they were quite beautiful, and Brian said, “….I should’ve gone first.” *laughs*)
In a completely surreal moment, Brian practically *apologized* to me for not reading from any of *my* books when they were having the readings done about love, but from SF/F novels. “But,” he said, “I thought it might be a little weird to have quotes from an author who was actually in the audience, and besides, it would take too long to read the entirety of From Russia, With Love. And,” he said, “the real romance in that is between Janx and Daisani, anyway. They’re my ‘ship pair.” Which is true of everyone, of course, but now I’m tempted to write a story just for the newlyweds. :) Anyway, I assured him it hadn’t even occurred to me that he might consider using something from one of my books, which is utterly true, but still, how flattering of him to even imagine such a thing. :)
It was an absolutely lovely day. We had a wonderful time. And now after a month of socializing, I am *wiped out*. Oi!
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movies
Conversation on chat last night:
“What movie did you go see?”
“A Dangerous Methos.” *pauses, staring at that, because after twelve years, more than twelve years, I still cannot type “method” without first typing “Methos”* “Method. A Dangerous Method.”
Follow-up on Twitter:
37 other people: I would totally go see A Dangerous Methos!
I love my friends. I do love my friends. :)
picoreview, btw: Pretty good. I was surprised by Kiera Knightly’s performance. I can see where she didn’t…quite…let all the way go…but at the same time, the opening scenes had me tense and uncomfortable, so she did a damned good job of it even if she didn’t quite break all the way free. Viggo Mortensen was resplendent as Freud, and Michael Fassbender was…it would have seemed like a better performance if I’d seen it before I saw “Shame”, which I saw a couple weeks ago. It’s not that he wasn’t good, it’s that in this, in “Shame”, and indeed in “X-Men: First Class” he’s playing variations on a theme, and “Shame” is the most extreme of them, so this performance paled. And now, thank you, I’ve seen enough of Fassbender’s pain, we all know he can do it, I’d like to see him in a romantic comedy now please.
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best. friends. EVER.
I just got a package in the mail from the redoubtable Blue Haired Angie. This is always a fun thing, so I opened it quite happily, and discovered within the two Beauty and the Beast comics Wendy Pini did based on the late 1980s television show. And I thought, “AWWW,” and smiled a lot, because that was very wonderful and thoughtful of Angie, and well, she couldn’t possibly know that I already owned them. So I plunked down happily to read the note that Angie sent along with the comics and halfway through the note I went… *!!!!!!* and opened them and
OH MY GOD THEY’RE SIGNED
I have the best friends *ever*. EVER. Apparently Angie found them three days before Wondercon and knew Wendy would be there, and SQUEEEEEE! BEST. FRIENDS. *EVER*. <3 <3 <3 On another topic entirely (
fivethree things make a post!), I was doing Pilates this morning and although I realize it’s anthropomorphizing, I swear sometimes my random shuffle on the MP3 player does things on purpose. There’s a coda from the Young Guns II soundtrack that ended up on my playlist, just one line by Keifer Sutherland: “You rode a fifteen year old boy straight to his grave, and the rest of us straight to hell.”Which, this morning, was followed immediately by “Walk Through the Fire” from Buffy. I love it when that happens. :)
In case you missed the Friday posting, I’m running an experiment, and have put an Old Races (Janx and Daisani) short story up for commission through fundable.com. All the details are here, but I wanted to mention it again because I posted it kind of late on Friday and because the commission is now halfway to goal, which is kind of (okay, VERY) exciting. :)
Okay. Tons of work to do today (ranging from housecleaning to revising to making BBQ sauce and macaroni salad because we found pork ribs! yay!), so I’m going to toddle off quite happily and work and think of how splendid my friends are and just. Yeah. Thank you, Angie, and everybody who’s participated in the commission so far, and…just yeah. Thank you all. You’re awesome.
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what excellent friends :)
Sammy & Myles, who have evidently been taking sneak lessons on The Care & Feeding Of A Kit, arrived (in the form of Myles) on the doorstep this morning bearing a bottle of wine (in congratulations for a million published words) and a bar of 72% dark chocolate (to help get me through the Novelist’s Event Horizon).
This, combined with an especially nice comment from fantasy novelist Michelle Sagara, has cheered me quite a lot. Also, Ted took me out of the house and we wandered around in the sunshine for a bit, and had lunch, and that was good too.
A lot of today’s writing so far has entailed reading my synopsis really carefully and leaving myself notes about what I’m going to need to fix when the draft is done. But I’ve also managed a thousand words, and I think I’m basically going to go try to work more or less steadily until Doctor Who comes on, at which point there will be Who, Who Confidential, and then however much of BSG season 3 we burn through tonight.
Later I will pick up on the “How many books have I written” meme spawned by EBear after discussion on Jay Lake & others’ journals. It would be best if ‘later’ was not ‘forty minutes from now’, as implied by the above paragraph.