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*falls down laughing*

OH MY GOD. This is the most fun I've EVER had hoovering.

I switched on the Roomba this morning and set it loose in my bedroom, the room with the fewest obstacles in it right now since the bed isn't in there yet. It's rambling around like a drunk playing tag, bonking into walls in some random pattern that makes sense only to its tiny adorable AI brain. I spent ten minutes just watching it, laughing hysterically, waiting for it to find the door to the living room as it repeatedly humped my snow boots and the (closed) bathroom door.

It does look majorly creepy rounding the corner of the doorway, like some kind of giant sneaky bug, but the rest of the time it's like a very tidy kitten. As I wrote this it rambled its way under my futon, tried to eat my feet, and then wandered back into the bedroom where it resumed its love affair with my shoes.

It's noisy, but not as noisy as a vacuum cleaner would be, to be honest. And it seems to be doing a reasonably good job of tidying the place, though it's missed a few corners and doesn't get on well with the roach traps. I've had to free three from its clutches already, and pick up about four more to prevent a wrestling match.

Man, it really likes those snow boots.

(no subject)

Help, it won't stop roombaing.

I tried to put it away because the floor could not now be any cleaner, but the Roomba doesn't seem to like the docking station. IT WANTS MY SHOES.

I can't get it to dock -- every time I try, it gives me a little fakeout-beep and then turns around and zooms off in the opposite direction from the docking station. It's cleaned under my futon at least four times.

Fortunately, the battery ran out, but it still won't actually dock even when I put it foursquare on the docking station. I've had to unplug the docking station and run the cord right into the machine itself. It's now sitting on the docking station and still refusing to dock, little red "battery recharge" light blinking balefully at me.

I will say that my floors, even the rug in the kitchen with the ground-in macaroni-and-cheese stain, are now spotless.

A lot of people have asked me what I'm going to name it, and the answer is I'm not -- I've learned from hard experience that when I name technology it tends to break (don't get me started on Loner the Laptop; the only thing it didn't do was burst into flames).

One of the more charming things about the Roomba is actually the little sticker that comes on the plastic bag the owner's manual comes in:

This robot contains an electronics and software interface that allows you to control or modify its behavior, and remotely monitor its sensors. For software programmers interested in giving Roomba new functionality, we encourage you to do so.

I want a hack that allows you to upload music to the Roomba, so that it sings as it cleans. Or, at any rate, so that it swears every time it runs into a wall.

*bonk* "Shit!" *bonk* "Ow!" *bonk* "Nooooo!" *bonk* "Shit!"

I'm going to make it a Dalek costume for Halloween.

(no subject)

Okay, "catching up" may have been overstating it last week, but I'm caught up now!

Sam's Three (or rather Six) things about Stargate Atlantis.

Spoilers for 5.08: ( The Queen )

3a. I dislike how Stargate Atlantis -- as with many other television shows, I will admit -- manufactures a mini-climax in the teaser so that there's some kind of suspense during the opening credits. It's this weird thing where they think if you're on edge during the credits, you're more likely to watch the rest of the episode. Which is funny because as soon as the show comes back on they immediately snap the tension by making what happened in the teaser utterly irrelevant. I'm not sure if I'm actually elucidating this correctly, but let's put it this way:

SGA: Teaser ends with the team and a trio of Wraith aiming weapons at each other. Act one opens with the Wraith immediately standing down. That moment had no real point, because we've already been shown how tense the team are in a variety of other ways.

The X-Files (to go old school): Teaser shows a disfigured man burying something in the ground, and then a child playing in the dirt lot later discovering it's a baby. Act one opens with the beginning of an investigation. We don't really find out who the man is or why he buried the baby for a good twenty minutes at least.

The first example is aimed at creating an OMG WHAT HAPPENS NEXT sensation, though because we've seen a lot of these and we know nothing that action-packed is going to happen in the first five minutes, it rarely actually succeeds. The second example creates a sensation of "I need to know what's going on in this story" which, because we don't know what's going on until the climax, keeps us more firmly involved in the plot. (And that wasn't even one of the best X-Files episodes.)

Wow, that was a really long 3a.

Spoilers for Episode 5.09: ( Tracker )

3a. Why do people always take cover under the DHD, as if not being shot is going to be any help at all if you can't dial the gate because the Wraith fried the DHD?

And here's just a general Thing brought on by the past six things:

I feel that rewriting From Out Of The Rain and writing the Torchwood Chicago duology helped me to start looking at storytelling in a different light. I learned a lot about how to work an audience and work with an audience to tell a story worth telling. In reading my three things from recent weeks it's becoming evident that I'm improving as a writer not necessarily in the technical nuts-and-bolts sense but overall, in a way I haven't done since I started writing Discworld fic. I'm more conscious now of how to evoke a reaction and convey information in a -- well, what I like to think of as a seductive fashion.

I've always seen stories as dual-layered, a story on top and a message or an exploration underneath, a one-two punch that requires subtlety to execute well. I'm becoming dissatisfied with stories that are only surface, that have the potential to carry something much more interesting and thoughtful than the usual cliches (particularly in science-fiction). I can see in a given story where the writers could have -- should have -- taken it deeper, what they should have focused on instead of what they did. It's common to SGA that the fic writers do this, improving on the universe we're presented with, and I'm pleased that I can take part in that as well.

It sounds arrogant, but honestly? Most of the time I can write better versions of the stories I'm seeing.

Now if only I could dig that deep into the ones I made up myself.