A World of Violins

This weekend, actually, was good.

Several of us (bamboofae, fisherking, shiftyjoe, dancingdeer, reahkitty, Russ, Crystal and Crystal's Mom) went to Tulsa Saturday evening for a night of fun driving and eating at an Irish pub. Tragically, there are no Irish pubs in Fayetteville (nothing more than wannabes anyway) so we have to drive two hours for anything approaching authentic. Paddy's Irish Pub and Restaurant is fairly authentic, actually, complete with barmaiden/owner with an enormous brogue, huge sturdy wooden tables and passably Gaelic cuisine. I'm not sure if you can see the White Cliffs of Dover or anything when you bite into your bangers and mash, but they do put a lot of effort into the presentation, which I can respect.

I had the Gaelic chicken sandwich with cheddar (probably blasphemous, but oh so good), a really good glass of Beringer cabernet, and apple-cinnamon bread pudding...which of course is the real reason I drive two hours just to eat out. It is an amazing dessert. :9 The trip there and home was really a lot of fun, though I don't remember much about coming back. I remember waking up from the back seat just in time to sing this song I really like, and then watch as we rolled into Fayetteville. Then I wandered upstairs and crashed for a bit.

Sunday was interesting. Carson, my XP box, has been riddled with a virus that had eaten its way into the registry. This had been bugging me for a solid week and a half, perhaps. Not sure how I got it, in hindsight, but I do know it was just impossible to get rid of. I tried everything I could find on the subject, from the generic "How to clean your computer" tutorials to the very specific "This is how you get rid of this one virus" page. Nothing worked. So I wiped XP and reinstalled, which seems to have done the trick.

Installing XP was fairly painless, which honestly surprised me. I've set up my computer roughly the way I want it to be (there'll be more tweaking, of course), and reinstalled all of my old programs. I'm honestly thinking about converting Carson to Ubuntu Linux when I get my hub for the computers and get a bit more comfortable fooling around with everything, and maybe even making Harvey my Windows box instead. I'd love to be able to swing Linux completely, but...something tells me I should have a least one Winbox, just in case...

Anyway, I threw a tantrum last night, which...surprises me and doesn't all at once. The wireless network card on my laptop has been awfully dodgy for quite some time, cutting out and resetting my connection at increasingly frequent intervals. Yesterday it was hopelessly bad, twitching out constantly and probably disconnecting me an average of four times every ten minutes. I think it might have been October catching up with me, and my frustration with the horrendously bad TV disaster movie I was watching at the time, but I ripped the card out of my slot and threw it against the wall. To make certain it knew my murderous intentions, I picked it up and ripped it apart just a little later. It put up a fight, but I got it in the end, and now it knows not to mess with me any more. Of course, this also means I can't go online with my laptop until I get a new one. This expense will be quite some time away, since everything I make for the next month (and I mean everything) will go towards the vacation in December. I should probably use the laptop for straight writing, more, anyway.

Things have been...frustrating as of late. With so much going wrong over so little a time, my nerves are admittedly frayed. I'm not really prone to violent outbursts...maybe passive-aggressive snarkiness every once in a while...so last night was a big indication that something's wrong. Compared to some other people who make a living out of being dicks at every opportunity of righteous indignation, I'm doing OK...but still, for me I'm pretty far left of center.

Still, no rest for the weary. I'll be going to work later today to try and catch up on things that I need to. If I could have a productive day, I'd feel tremendously better. Here's to hoping.

On Standards

the_gneech posted a bit in his LiveJournal about the status of Yerf, and how even if the archive were to come back tomorrow it would take more than just...its presence to rebuild Yerf. In one of those "you never really miss it until it's gone" situations, I missed the impact and import of Yerf until, maybe, a few months ago. It was one of the best ways you could break the uninitiated into the furry fandom; if someone went, "Hey, what's furry about?" you could go "Oh, it's about funny animals...here!" and send them to Yerf without fear of, you know, a Nazi wolf spinning a rabbit in diapers on his penis and force-feeding him butter.

Of course, whenever the subject of Yerf comes up, the subject of standards and 'elitism' is almost always sure to follow. A lot of people (especially budding and/or adult artists) were really vocal critics of Yerf, stating mostly that the Yerf crowd was just a bunch of snobs and prudes who liked to gather 'round and pat each other on the back over how incredibly awesome they were. Back in my younger, more incendiary days, I could see the argument. Now, more and more, though, I'm thinking maybe the folks at Yerf just wanted a gallery of good clean art on unlined paper. What's really wrong with that?

I could follow it up by saying that the furry fandom seems to have a problem with any sort of standards being imposed on it. But it's not a furry-specific problem. I know loads of people, furry and non, who love to become righteously indignant when you place any sort of standards or expectations on them. It's become politically incorrect to expect people to strive at what they do to not be bad at it forever. If you want to be an artist, you should work to make yourself a good artist. If you want to be a friend, you should work to make yourself a good friend. If you want to be a writer, you should work to make yourself a good writer. The people around should of course support you -- but much of that support includes letting you know when you've gotten off track. Or when you're missing the mark entirely.

A lot of the places I used to consider horrifically elitist (The Giant's Club especially) I've come to realize aren't as bad as I thought. Sure, they've got their problems, but mostly the patrons of, say, the SCFA or the GC really just want to have a certain standard of behavior and effort maintained. That's all. And it's worthwhile to strive for that standard if that's really where you want to go. There's no shame in admitting you have room for improvement.

This isn't as good an essay as I hoped it would be. :) But then, they almost always never are.